renice - Changing A Job's Priority

If you are running more than one job across multiple servers, you will need to schedule the second and any additional jobs at the lowest priority.

Job priority is expressed by a niceness value, which you can set between 0 and 19. The default is 0, but by choosing a larger number you make a job "nicer", which means it runs at a lower priority when there is demand from other jobs of higher priority.

Here we see the output of the top command:

Below the white line we see a job running under USER fengb, and COMMAND "Macaulay2", with a niceness value (expressed in the NI column) of 0.

If this user were running another job on any of the other public servers he would need to change the priority of one of them to 19, the lowest priority. To do this, the user in this case would issue the command renice +19 -p 30377

(30377 is the process identification number of the job and is obtained from the PID column)

You should renice your jobs in a similar way in accordance with the above instructions.