UW-Madison CS Dept. HTCondor Pool Policies
The policies in effect for our HTCondor pool are described below. Contact htcondor-admin@cs.wisc.edu to request a customized policy for your workstation or to comment on these policies.Start
HTCondor 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
HTCondor 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.
- 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.
- 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. HTCondor 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
HTCondor 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 HTCondor Manual describes the HTCondor priority mechanisms in more detail.Job Submission
Job submission is currently disabled on the instructional workstations. We encourage users to submit HTCondor jobs from their desktop workstations. If that is not possible, contact htcondor-admin@cs.wisc.edu and we will make alternate arrangements for you.