Specifying Policy Priority

Before the grid engine system dispatches jobs, the jobs are brought into priority order, highest priority first. Without any administrator influence, the order is first-in-first-out (FIFO).

On the Policy Configuration dialog box, under Policy Importance Factor, you can specify the relative importance of the three priority types that control the sorting order of jobs:

• Priority. Also called POSIX priority. The –p option of the qsub command specifies site-specific priority policies.

• Urgency Policy. Jobs can have an urgency value that determines their relative importance. Pending jobs are sorted according to their urgency value.

• Ticket Policy. Jobs are always treated according to their relative importance as defined by the number of tickets that the jobs have. Pending jobs are sorted in ticket order.

For more information about job priorities, see Job Sorting.

You can specify a weighting factor for each priority type. This weighting factor determines the degree to which each type of priority affects overall job priority. To make it easier to control the range of values for each priority type, normalized values are used instead of the raw ticket values, urgency values, and POSIX priority values.

The following formula expresses how a job's priority values are determined:

Job priority = Urgency * normalized urgency value + 
Ticket * normalized ticket value + 
Priority * normalized priority value

Urgency, Ticket, and Priority are the three weighting factors you specify under Policy Importance Factor. For example, if you specify Priority as 1, Urgency as 0.1, and Ticket as 0.01, job priority that is specified by the qsub –p command is given the most weight, job priority that is specified by the Urgency Policy is considered next, and job priority that is specified by the Ticket Policy is given the least weight.