[Bioclusters] How to setup fair_share schedule in OpenPBS

[Guishan Zheng]

Dear all,

Recently, we got a new PC cluster and use OpenPBS 2.3 to manage all jobs to be
executed. OpenPBS is a new stuff to our administration group. Currently, we use
all default setup in OpenPBS and thus as we've known, the scheduler would be
FIFO and the policy is FIFO, which is not fair as we understood. Thus, it would
be nice for us to use fair_share rule, which would make whole system resource be
fair and more efficiently used by all users. However, we are not 100% sure
whether the only change is change option of "fair_share" from "false" to "true"
in file sched_config on PBS server. What else we should do for making this
"fair_share" working? Is there better rule than fair_share to make all user have
fair share of system resources?

As well, it would be nice for all users to know what is the order of their jobs
in the queue, from which they could know when the jobs from themselves would be
picked up. Is there any command could show this? What's the meaning of SessID? 

I appreciate your attention and all response.

Thanks a lot.

Guishan Zheng