[torqueusers] Re: [Mauiusers] potential of misuse with interactive jobs

[Garrick Staples]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 04:05:24PM -0400, Neelesh Arora alleged:
> Hi All,
> 
> In a setup like ours:
> multiple queues with different max_cputime limits, users specify 
> required cputime, jobs get routed accordingly
> there is a potential of resource hoarding, in that a user may submit an 
> interactive job with very high cputime and block a node for future use. 
> Since the job does not accrue cputime, it is not effected by the queue's 
> max_cputime limit.
> 
> We would like to avoid this scenario and I can think of 2 ways to do it:
> - route interactive jobs to a separate queue (with limited max_cputime)
> - identify an interactive job at submission and set a very low walltime 
> (similar to above)
> - disable interactive jobs at the server level
> 
> I am afraid I can't find the way to achieve any of these. Can someone 
> please apprise me how this can be done? How do others avoid such misuse?

There isn't a way to enforce policy based on interactive jobs.

Btw, understand that such a feature would always be trivial to bypass.  
Users can run the exact same commands in interactive and batch jobs.  My
own users like to do naughty things like this:

  echo sleep 999999 | qsub

The smarter ones do this:
  echo screen -m -D | qsub

The best solution to these things is this:
  qselect -u <username> | xargs qdel
  chsh <username> /bin/false