UW-Madison CS Dept. Condor Pool Policies

The policies in effect for our Condor pool are described below. Contact condor-admin@cs.wisc.edu to request a customized policy for your workstation or to comment on these policies.

Start

Condor will start running a job on a desktop workstation when:

the one minute CPU load average falls below 0.3 and
the console keyboard, mouse, and ttys have all been idle for over 15 minutes and
the job's footprint takes less than 80% of the workstation's available memory.

Preempt

Condor will preempt (that is, stop running) a job when:

the job has been suspended for at least 10 minutes or
the conditions are set to suspend a job or
the job's footprint requires more than 80% of the workstation's available memory.

Condor may use three different mechanisms to preempt the job. Condor will suspend the job by sending a SIGSTOP to all job processes if:

the job's footprint requires more than 80% of the workstation's available memory or
preemption was triggered by keyboard activity or
the CPU has been busy for at least 2 minutes and the job has been running for longer than 90 seconds.

Condor will unsuspend a suspended job by sending a SIGCONT to all job processes if:

the CPU is idle and
the keyboard has all been idle for more than 5 minutes and
the job's footprint takes less than 80% of the workstation's available memory.

A standard universe job that is preempted is given time to write a checkpoint and then exit. Condor will kill the job by sending a SIGKILL to all job processes if:

a standard universe job has been taking a checkpoint for at least 10 minutes or
the job has been in the preempt state for at least 10 minutes.

Periodic Checkpointing

Condor jobs run under the standard universe will take periodic checkpoints every 3 hours for fault tolerance.

Priorities

There are three tiers of user priorities in our pool. Local users have the highest priority, followed by users from outside the university, followed by "nice users" (i.e., with "nice-user" in their name). The Condor Manual describes the Condor priority mechanisms in more detail.

Job Submission

Job submission is currently disabled on the instructional workstations. We encourage users to submit Condor jobs from their desktop workstations. If that is not possible, contact condor-admin@cs.wisc.edu and we will make alternate arrangements for you.

condor-admin@cs.wisc.edu