Sites possess workloads of varying importance, and users may want to run jobs with higher priorities before jobs with lower priorities. This can be done by using preemption. Preemption is simply the process by which a higher-priority job can take the place of a lower-priority job. You can also use preemption for optimistic scheduling and development job support.

This section explains how to configure and use preemption. Simple example of preemption offers a basic introduction and contains examples to help you get started using preemption. The other sections offer more explanation and information about what you can do with preemption and contain some best practices that will help you avoid the need for troubleshooting in the future.

While this section does not explain every possible preemption configuration, it does prescribe the best practices for setting up and using preemption with your system. It is recommended that you follow the established instructions contained in this guide.

Preemption does not work with dynamic provisioning.

You should not allow preemption with interactive jobs unless PREEMPTPOLICY is set to CANCEL. (For more information, see Using CANCEL.)

For details, see these topics:

• Simple example of preemption
• Using QoS preemption
• Choosing a PREEMPTPOLICY type
• Using owner preemption
• Manually preempting jobs
• Testing and troubleshooting preemption