Sharing Functional Ticket Shares

The functional policy defines entitlement shares for the functional categories. Then the policy defines shares for all members of each of these categories. The functional policy is thus similar to a two-level share tree. The difference is that a job can be associated with several categories at the same time. The job belongs to a particular user, for instance, but the job can also belong to a project, a department, and a job class.

However, as in the share tree, the entitlement shares that a job receives from a functional category is determined by the following:

• The shares that are defined for its corresponding category member (for example, its project)

• The shares that are given to the category (project instead of user, department, and so on)

Use the Share Functional Tickets check box to set the share_functional_shares parameter of sched_conf(5). This parameter defines how the category member shares are used to determine the shares of a job. The shares assigned to the category members, such as a particular user or project, can be replicated for each job. Or shares can be distributed among the jobs under the category member.

• Selecting the Share Functional Tickets check box means that functional shares are replicated among jobs.

• Clearing the Share Functional Tickets check box means that functional shares are distributed among jobs.

Those shares are comparable to stock shares. Such shares have no effect for the jobs that belong to the same category member. All jobs under the same category member have the same number of shares in both cases. But the share number has an effect when comparing the share amounts within the same category. Jobs with many siblings that belong to the same category member receive relatively small share portions if you select the Share Functional Tickets check box. On the other hand, if you clear the Share Functional Tickets check box, all sibling jobs receive the same share amount as their category member.

Select the Share Functional Tickets check box to give a category member a constant entitlement level for the sum of all its jobs. The entitlement of an individual job can get negligibly small, however, if the job has many siblings.

Clear the Share Functional Tickets check box to give each job the same entitlement level, based on its category member's entitlement. The number of job siblings in the system does not matter.

A category member with many jobs underneath can dominate the functional policy.

Be aware that the setting of share functional shares does not determine the total number of functional tickets that are distributed. The total number is always as defined by the administrator for the functional policy ticket pool. The share functional shares parameter influences only how functional tickets are distributed within the functional policy.

Example 5–1 Functional Policy Example

The following example describes a common scenario where a user wishes to translate the SGE-5.3 Scheduler Option -user_sort true to an N1GE 6.1 Configuration but does not understand the share override functional policy ticket feature.

For a plain user-based equal share, you configure your global configuration sge_conf(5) with

Then you use -weight_tickets_functional 10000 in the scheduler configuration sched_conf(5). This action causes the functional policy to be used for user-based equal share scheduling with 100 shares for each user.