Improving O2 Efficiency by Changing User Priority

Beginning on November 2022, HMS-RC started to lower the job priority of O2 Users who consistently request substantially more cluster RAM memory than they actually use.

The goal of this initiative is to help researchers get more science done.

HMS-RC will not penalize jobs that are only slightly inefficient, small batches of jobs, or interactive sessions. Inefficient jobs hurt O2's productivity for everyone, increasing pending times both for those submitting those jobs and for others waiting in the queue. So improving jobs' efficiency will help all Users.

A User significantly over requesting memory will first receive a warning notice; if no attempt is done to improve RAM efficiency the User’s priority will be lowered and we will notify the User again.

All notifications will be sent to the email address listed in the User .forward file ($HOME/.forward)

This priority reduction is temporary and will be automatically removed once the User’s efficiency improves.

To learn more about job efficiency and learn how you can identify your RAM utilization please check our wiki page Optimizing O2 jobs

Research Computing Consultants are happy to work with any researchers on correctly estimating resources for their job submissions.

If you have any question or concern, please contact us at rchelp@hms.harvard.edu.