Job Scheduling Under the Portable Batch System

The typical batch queuing system schedules jobs for execution by a set of queue controls. The controls determine from which queues jobs may be selected. Within the queue, jobs are ordered first-in, first-run. This limits the set of scheduling policies available to a site. The Portable Batch System removes this limitation by providing an external scheduling module. This separate program has full knowledge of the available queued jobs, running jobs, and system resource usage. Sites are able to implement any policy expressible in one of several procedural language. Policies may range from "bet fit" to "fair share" to purely political. Scheduling decisions can be made over the full set of jobs regardless of queue or order. The scheduling policy can be changed to fit a wide variety of computing environments and scheduling goals. This is demonstrated by the use of PBS on an IBM SP-2 system at NASA Ames.