Resource usage limits control how much resource can be consumed by running jobs. Jobs that use more than the specified amount of a resource are signalled or have their priority lowered.
Limits can be specified by the LSF administrator:
For example, by defining a high-priority short queue, you can allow short jobs to be scheduled earlier than long jobs. To prevent some users from submitting long jobs to this short queue, you can set CPU limit for the queue so that no jobs submitted from the queue can run for longer than that limit.
Limits specified at the queue level are hard limits, while those specified with job submission or in an application profile are soft limits. The hard limit acts as a ceiling for the soft limit. See setrlimit(2) man page for concepts of hard and soft limits.
Resource usage limits are not the same as resource allocation limits, which are enforced during job scheduling and before jobs are dispatched. You set resource allocation limits to restrict the amount of a given resource that must be available during job scheduling for different classes of jobs to start, and which resource consumers the limits apply to. .
Resource usage limits are not the same as queue-based resource reservation limits, which are enforced during job submission. The parameter RESRSV_LIMIT (in lsb.queues) specifies allowed ranges of resource values, and jobs submitted with resource requests outside of this range are rejected.
Incorrect limits are ignored, and a warning message is displayed when the cluster is reconfigured or restarted. A warning message is also logged to the mbatchd log file when LSF is started.
Resource usage limits specified at job submission must be less than the maximum specified in lsb.queues. The job submission is rejected if the user-specified limit is greater than the queue-level maximum, and the following message is issued: