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Available Queues

What queues are available and what to use them for

Available Queues

The jalapeno cluster provides four primary queues: ''short.q'', ''long.q'' and ''verylong.q'' and two special purpose queues, ''bigmem.q'' and ''interactive.q''. By choosing the most appropriate queue you can gain access to more resources so it pays to think about the right queue to use. Further, if you choose a queue that has resource limits and your job exceeds this (time or memory) then your task will be killed, wasting compute time.

N.B. To select a particular queue using the ''fsl_sub'' command use the ''-q <queue-name>'' option or use the -T and -R or --coprocessor* options to automatically select the queue to use.

N.B. The time limits we specify below refer to CPU time - this is NOT real-time. Because the compute cluster is shared, a job often gets a fraction of the available time on the CPU so a job that actually takes 1 hour to run may only have used 25 minutes of CPU time.

Queue Max Runtime Max RAM (GB) Usage
veryshort.q 30 mins 16 Very quick tasks. Largest number of slots. Use these as much as possible to get your jobs off the shared login servers
short.q 4h 16 Brief tasks. The short/veryshort queues take precedence over all other queues so if your task fits on this queue it would be in your best interests to run it here
long.q 48h 16 The default queue. Tasks can run for a maximum of 48 hours CPU time. Most of the FSL software runs in this sort of time frame with the possible exception of some large group FEAT tasks.
verylong.q infinite 12 Lowest priority and limited number of slots. Tasks which will take longer than 48 hours must be run here. These tasks get the lowest priority under the assumption that there will be plenty of spare CPU (esp. overnight) to ensure they run in a sensible time frame.
bigmem.q infinite ~300 The bigmem.q is for running large memory footprint tasks. There are very few of these slots, which may use any available RAM on a host. Avoid unless necessary, and please seek assistance before using.
cuda.q infinite ~200 Targets machines with NVIDIA GPU hardware. Use the
--coprocessor options to configure this resource (see GPU tasks in the Advanced Usage section). This queue has no limits but please limit long running tasks as this is significantly more restricted resource.
interactive.q infinite 16 Where you just can't run a task without interaction, for example you have to press a start button in a window, then we offer an interactive queue. This cannot be used as a fsl_sub target. See interactive queue  for further details.