Purdue University

Purdue IT operates a number of Community Clusters which allow researchers to purchase access to a large computational cluster through the Community Cluster Program. These systems offer priority access to a portion of the system as paid for by the researcher, but also offer "standby" access to the rest of the system, whenever it would otherwise not be busy.

To facilitate this, all community clusters run a scheduling system which offers multiple queues for job submission. At least one queue is created for the research group's priority access. This is restricted to the number of cores to which access was purchased, allows for very long jobs, and is usually named after the group or faculty member.

Also, users may send jobs to the "standby" queue. This queue is open to anyone, but offers only a relatively short run time per job, usually about 4 hours. This ensures that if jobs come in to other queues, any running standby jobs will complete soon and their nodes made available to the priority queues.

The exact names, configurations, and limits on these queues may vary slightly from system to system.