Using Tickets to Administer Policies

The functional, share-based, and override policies are defined through a grid engine system concept that is called tickets. You might compare tickets to shares of a public company's stock. The more stock shares that you own, the more important you are to the company. If shareholder A owns twice as many shares as shareholder B, A also has twice the votes of B. Therefore shareholder A is twice as important to the company. Similarly, the more tickets that a job has, the more important the job is. If job A has twice the tickets of job B, job A is entitled to twice the resource usage of job B.

Jobs can retrieve tickets from the functional, share-based, and override policies. The total number of tickets, as well as the number retrieved from each ticket policy, often changes over time.

The administrator controls the number of tickets that are allocated to each ticket policy in total. Just as ticket allocation does for jobs, this allocation determines the relative importance of the ticket policies among each other. Through the ticket pool that is assigned to particular ticket policies, the administration can run a grid engine system in different ways. For example, the system can run in a share-based mode only. Or the system can run in a combination of modes, for example, 90% share-based and 10% functional.