[Condor-users] Flocking drawback

["Thomas Materna" <materna@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I have major problems with flocking. I have a pool A of 3 computers sharing a filesystem. I have a pool B of 20 computers not sharing the same file system as the pool A. A flocks to B. I have a bunch of jobs submitted from A in standard universe but I have a very bad priority since I've been doing that a lot lately. Another user also has whole bunch of jobs submitted to A. But his are in vanilla universe, he added in his submit file a requirement of the type

((Machine==A1) || (Machine==A2)...) where A1, A2 are the machines in the pool A.

 

Well, he will never run on pool B, but he prevents me from running on it!!!! What happens is that at every cycle, having a better priority, he claims all the machines in pool B, my jobs can hence not do so. Only then the jobs reject the machines for not meeting the requirement. I have 20 machines doing nothing!

 

How can I get around that? Is there a way to avoid the jobs claiming machine they won't accept to run on anyway? If not, I consider it a major flaw. One user like that could stop everything. And since he's not running, his priority won't go up. I'll have to wait 5 days to have my priority back to a competitive level. And even then, some machines won't be used.

 

Thanks for any help you guys could provide,

 

Thomas