10.1 Consumable Resource Handling

Maui is designed to inherently handle consumable resources. Nodes possess resources, and workload (jobs) consume resources. Maui tracks any number of consumable resources on a per node and per jobs basis. Work is under way to allow 'floating' per system resources to be handled as well. When a job is started on a set of nodes, Maui tracks how much of each available resource must be dedicated to the tasks of the job. This allows Maui to prevent per node oversubscription of any resource, be it CPU, memory, swap, local disk, etc.

Recent enhancements to Loadleveler (version 2.2 and above) finally provide a resource manager capable of exercising this long latent capability. These changes allow a user to specify per task consumable resources and per node available resources. For example, a job may be submitted requiring 20 tasks, with 2 CPUs and 256 MB per task. Thus, Maui would allow a node with 1 GB of Memory and 16 processors to allow run 4 of these tasks because 4 tasks would consume all of the available memory. Consumable resources allow more intelligent allocation of resources allowing better management of shared node resources.

No steps are required to enable this capability, simply configure the underlying resource manager to support it and Maui will pick up this configuration.