Why a Queue Manager?

Introduction

With so many personal devices around nowadays: laptops, smartphones, etc., it's normal to ask the question, "why must I submit to a queue manager?".

Most of this can be explained by the personal nature of such devices, and how this can lure users into thinking that queuing is really a bad dream from the past which is happily becoming rarer now. A look around modern life will show you that this is not the actually the case. In fact there is a good argument for syaing that the number of queues has increased, though queue management has become more focused and more efficient.

This is the case with marvin computer cluster, it has a very efficient queue manager called Grid Engine, which will be explained here. Yes, it does mean some small inconveniences, but if one undertands that it is a resource shared by a significant number of people workign on different research projects

Why?

computational intensity

A computer cluster tends to attract some very compute-intensive workloads. These are not, in fact, so common in practice, but research projects are often trying to solve some thorny problems, and some programs may resort to trying out all possible solutions and seeing which gives the right answer. Because the machines are on 24 hours a day, and users also do not have to supervise the processing (they can go away and come back later), some workloads are capable of taking up all possible resources from everybody else.