The man page for sbatch says this about the --nice option: --nice[=adjustment] > Run the job with an adjusted scheduling priority within Slurm. With no > adjustment value the scheduling priority is decreased by 100. A > negative nice value increases the priority, otherwise decreases it. > The adjustment range is +/- 2147483645. Only privileged users can > specify > a negative adjustment. >
Does the --nice adjustment just apply to jobs I submit, or does it figure into a system-wide priority? If it applies just to my own jobs, it's very useful because as a non-admin user (who can't adjust jobs to have higher priority) I can submit regular jobs with --nice and keep open the possibility of submitting higher priority ones (without using --nice) later on. That's great, as my higher priority jobs then don't have to wait behind the sometimes many thousands of my other jobs. But if --nice applies system wide, it's hard to imagine people using it. If I did, and no one else does, I'm asking for my jobs to be run at a lower priority than many, many jobs that are already in the system and which will arrive in the meantime. I'm sure the job will run eventually, but... Can someone confirm which of these is the case? Or is it more complicated than that? Thanks! Terry