Shared vs. Dedicated Partitions

The CRE can configure a partition to allow multiple MPI jobs to be running on it concurrently. Such partitions are referred to as shared partitions. The CRE can also configure a partition to permit only one MPI job to run at a time. These are called dedicated partitions.

In the following example, the partition part0 is configured to be a dedicated partition and part1 is configured to allow shared use by up to four processes.

node1# mpadmin[node0]:: part0[node0] P[part0]:: set max_total_procs=1[node0] P[part0]:: part1[node0] P[part1]:: set max_total_procs=4[node0] P[part1]::

The max_total_procs attribute defines how many processes can be active on each node in the partition for which it is being set. In this example, it is set to 1 on part0, which means only one job can be running at a time. It is set to 4 on part1 to allow up to four jobs to be started on that partition.

Note again, that the context-changing shortcut (introduced in "Enabling Nodes") is used in the second and fourth lines of this example.