Re: [HTCondor-users] How to prevent jobs to submit new jobs?

[Matthew Farrellee <matt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/15/2013 06:53 AM, Chris Filo Gorgolewski wrote:
> Hi,
> I run into a peculiar problem. Users are submitting jobs that submit
> more jobs. This is problematic because if gets preempted and restarted
> all the jobs it had submitted will be submitted again causing general
> chaos. So how can I  prevent jobs to submit new jobs?
>
> Best,
> Chris

If the user's job runs with the user's identity/credentials there are no 
reasonable options.

If the user's job does not run w/ the user's identity/credentials you 
can lock down the schedd to not allow submissions from the 
identity/credentials that the jobs are using (possibly nobody or a slot 
user).

The root cause being users writing jobs that "misbehave" by your 
definition of misbehave (not cleaning up after themselves or not 
checking if they've already partially run). This is often where you have 
to step into policy and social engineering.

You could explore disabling preemption for the users who have jobs that 
submit more jobs. Condor provides a tool called DAGMan that is basically 
a well written job that submits more jobs, maybe your users should be 
using it. Alternatively, you can educate the users about your definition 
of misbehaving and give them guidance on how to properly behave, then 
provide incentives by giving misbehaving users an overall lower priority 
in your pool (let the fair share algorithm have a memory).

Best,


matt