Moab is designed to inherently handle consumable resources. Nodes possess resources, and workload consumes resources. Moab tracks any number of consumable resources on a per node and per job basis. Floating cluster resources can be handled as well; see Managing Shared Cluster Resources. When a job is started on a set of nodes, Moab tracks how much of each available resource must be dedicated to the tasks of the job. This allows Moab to prevent per node over-subscription of any resource, be it CPU, memory, swap, or local disk.

Recent resource managers (such as Loadleveler version 3.x) provide the ability to exercise this capability. These capabilities 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, Moab would allow a node with 1 GB of memory and 16 processors to 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 scheduler-level configuration is required to enable this capability as Moab detects the needed information automatically from the underlying resource manager.

See Also

• Managing Generic Consumable Resources
• Floating Generic Resources