wiki:MultiUserPriority

Version 1 (modified by davea, 12 years ago) (diff)

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Prioritizing jobs in a multi-user project

By default, BOINC processes jobs in a roughly first-in, first-out order. If your project has multiple job submitters, this is probably not what you want: users who submits lots of jobs would get more than their share of the project's capacity. BOINC has a set of mechanisms that address this issue. To use them, do the following:

Set the desired quotas for job submitters

Create a user account for each job submitter, and set their quotas.

Modify your job submission scripts or work generators

Wherever you create jobs - e.g. web scripts for remote job submission and work generators - you must set the priority of the jobs as follows:

  • Compute the total FLOP estimate (workunit.rsc_fpops_est) of the set of jobs.
  • Run adjust_user_priority to update and return the priority of the submitter:
    adjust_user_priority --user userID --flops X --app appname
    
    For example, in PHP:
    $cmd = "cd ../../bin; ./adjust_user_priority --user $user->id --flops $flops --app $app->name";
    $x = system($cmd);
    if (!is_numeric($x) || (double)$x == 0) {
       ... handle error
    }
    $priority = (double)$x;
    
  • Set job priorities. For example, use the --priority option to create_work. Also, if you're creating a batch, set batch.logical_end_time to the priority (this is not used for scheduling, but is used in displaying batches on the web).

Use the right feeder options

Run the feeder with the --priority_asc option.

Note: currently this can't be used in combination with the --all_apps option, or with homogeneous redundancy.