1.2 Philosophy and Goals of the Maui Scheduler

Managers desire maximum return on investment often meaning high system utilization and the ability to deliver various qualities of service to various users and groups. They need to understand how the available resources are being delivered to the various users over time and need the ability to have the administrators tune 'cycle delivery' to satisfy the current site mission objectives.

How well a scheduler succeeds can only be determined if various metrics are established and a means to measure these metrics are available. While statistics are important, their value is limited unless optimal statistical values are also known for the current environment including workload, resources, and policies. If one could determine that a site's typical workload obtained an average queue time of 3 hours on a particular system, this would be a good statistic. However, if one knew that through proper tuning, the system could deliver an average queue time of 1.2 hours with minimal negative side effects, this would be valuable knowledge.

The Maui Scheduler was developed with extensive feedback from users, administrators, and managers. At its core, it is a tool designed to truly manage resources and provide meaningful information about what is actually happening on the system. It was created to satisfy real-world needs of a batch system administrator as he tries to balance the needs of users, staff, and managers while trying to maintain his sanity.