How to limit cputime for interactive job ?

[spiraea]

Hi,

We have a system running HP-UX 11.23 and install a queueing system, LSF. we hope the jobs submitted through LSF without cputime limt or by queue config and force limiting the cputime 1 hour for submitted not through LSF. If set the limit in /etc/profile or cshrc, users can modify the value to unlimit.
Have any solution or kernel value can meet my requirement ?

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

You could take a look at PRM...

[Jean-Louis Phelix · Accepted solution]

Hi,

PRM could only limit shares on CPU, but not the total amount I think. But I'm more suprised by what you've written about ulimit. Once it's set, I think it can't be increased later (or at least I didn't succeed). From sh-posix man page :

The -H and -S flags specify whether the hard limit or the soft limit is set for the given resource. A hard limit cannot be increased once it is set. A soft limit can be increased up to the hard limit. If neither -H nor -S is specified, the limit applies to both.

On my system :
/home/phelix> ulimit -t
unlimited
/home/phelix> ulimit -t 2000
/home/phelix> ulimit -t
2000
/home/phelix> ulimit -t 3000
sh: ulimit: The specified value exceeds the user's allowable limit.
/home/phelix> ulimit -t
2000
/home/phelix>

Regards.

[spiraea]

Dera Jean-Louis,

Thanks for your reply.

When user's shell is csh, user can re-set the limit, just like the following:
% uname -a
HP-UX hermes1 B.11.23 U ia64 0658772443 unlimited-user license
% limit cputime
cputime unlimited
% limit cputime 10000
% limit cputime
cputime 2:46:40
% unlimit
% limit cputime
cputime unlimited

Could the ulimit value can apply to the cputime limit like the above?

[Dan Herington]

PRM will allow you to control the percentage of resource any group of processes gets, but doesn't kill anything if it goes above some threshold.

You can use Workload Manager to set up an SLO that allows the job x% for some amount of time and then some smaller amount (or nothing) after that. It won't kill it, but it will make sure it doesn't impact other things running on the system.

WLM is part of the Mission Critical OE. If this sounds interesting, let me know and I will provide more details on how to set up WLM to do this.

Dan