<html><head></head><body><div>ulimit is a way to set soft and hard limits on resource usage including RAM consumed.</div><div><br></div><div>On Wed, 2017-10-04 at 17:32 -0500, Todor Fassl wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex; border-left:2px #729fcf solid;padding-left:1ex"><pre>I manage a group of research servers for grad students at a university.
The grad students use these machines to do the research for their Ph.D
theses. The problem is that they pretty regularly kill off each other's
programs by using up all the ram. Most of the machines have 256G of ram.
One kid uses 200Gb and another 100Gb and one or the other, often both,
die. Sometimes they bringthe machines down by hogging the cpu or using
up all the ram. Well, the machines never crash but they might as well be
down.
We really, really don't want to force them to use a scheduling system
like slurm. They are just learnng and they might run the same piece of
code 20 times in an hour.
Is there a way to set a limit on the amount of ram all of a user's
processes can use? If so, we were thinking of setting it at 50% of the
on-board ram. Then it would take 3 students together to trash a machine.
It might still happen but it would be a lot more infrequent.
Any other suggestions? Anything at all? Just keep in mind that we really
want to keep it easy for the students to play around.
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