30/Job Urgency

This specification describes the Flux job urgency parameter.

Name	github.com/flux-framework/rfc/spec_30.rst
Editor	Jim Garlick <garlick@llnl.gov>
State	raw

Language

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Related Standards

• 21/Job States and Events Version 1

Background

The Flux job urgency parameter reflects the job owner’s idea of the job’s importance relative to other work queued on the system. It is one factor used by the job manager priority plugin to calculate the job priority, which determines queue listing order, and the order in which jobs are presented to the scheduler.

The urgency MAY be provided by the job owner at job submission time. It MAY be adjusted by the job owner while the job is pending.

Implementation

Job urgency SHALL be an integer with range of 0 through 31.

A guest user MAY set or update the urgency of their own jobs to values in the range of 0-16.

The instance owner MAY set or update the urgency of any job to any valid value.

If the urgency is unspecified during job submission, a default initial value of 16 is assigned.

A value of 0 indicates that the job should be held. A held job is assigned the lowest possible priority, bypassing the job manager priority plugin. Although it remains in the queue while pending, a held job SHALL NOT be assigned resources.

A value of 31 indicates that the job should be expedited. An expedited job is assigned the highest possible priority, bypassing the job manager priority plugin.

If the urgency is updated, the job manager priority plugin SHALL be notified so it can adjust the job’s priority.

The current urgency value SHALL persist across a Flux instance restart, therefore each change SHALL be recorded in the job’s event log.