Malleable jobs are jobs that can be adjusted in terms of resources and duration required, and which allow the scheduler to maximize job responsiveness by selecting a job's resource shape or footprint prior to job execution. Once a job has started, however, its resource footprint is fixed until job completion.

To enable malleable jobs, the underlying resource manager must support dynamic modification of resource requirements prior to execution (i.e., TORQUE) and the jobs must be submitted using the TRL (task request list) resource manager extension string. With the TRL attribute specified, Moab will attempt to select a start time and resource footprint to minimize job completion time and maximize overall effective system utilization (i.e., <AverageJobEfficiency> * <AverageSystemUtilization>).

Example

With the following job submission, Moab will execute the job in one of the following configurations: 1 node for 1 hour, 2 nodes for 30 minutes, or 4 nodes for 15 minutes.

> qsub -l nodes=1,trl=1@3600:2@1800:4@900 testjob.cmd
job 72436.orion submitted