[Swift-user] Question on coaster job time calculations

[Mihael Hategan]

On Wed, 2010-05-05 at 08:15 -0500, wilde at mcs.anl.gov wrote:
> In a Swift run with coasters, I set the sites element "maxTime" to 3
> hours to accommodate the longest jobs that the script runs.  But the
> script starts by running a single pre-processing job that is set to
> maxWallTime 30 mins.
> 
> I would have expected this single job to get placed in a coaster PBS
> job set to a wallTime closer to 30 mins,

Given that we are talking about coasters whose purpose is to bunch
multiple jobs into one big job, I find that expectation odd :)

What you want to play with is (low|high)Overallocation and
overallocationDecayFactor. They are documented in the swift user guide.
I believe that you want a slightly larger decay factor (say 0.003
instead of 0.001)

>  but the PBS walltime was set to 90 mins (causing the job to wait in
> the short queue rather than start right away in the fast queue; I have
> the sites "queue" element set to "route" which selects the best queue
> based on PBS walltime).

Though for 30 minutes and the default settings, you should get a block
walltime of about 75 minutes, not 90. Are you sure about the 90?