Patent ID: 7587718

Claim:
A method for enforcing a resource-usage policy in a compute farm, wherein the compute farm's resources are represented using a set of job slots, and wherein the set of job slots are managed by a queuing system, the method comprising: receiving etiquette rules which include: resource-usage rules which specify situations in which the resource-usage policy is violated, and corrective-action rules which specify situations in which a corrective action needs to be performed; receiving resource-usage information which includes: job monitoring data, which describes resource usage of monitored jobs, wherein each job is associated with multiple processes which perform a task, wherein for each monitored job, the job monitoring data specifies how long the monitored job has been executing, and how long the monitored job has been idle, and process monitoring data, which describes resource usage of monitored processes, wherein the process monitoring data indicates whether a monitored process is associated with a direct login by a user; determining a resource-usage violation by applying the resource-usage rules to the resource-usage information; storing the resource-usage violation in a violation database; determining a corrective action by applying corrective-action rules to a series of violations stored in the violation database; and performing the corrective action, thereby enforcing the resource-usage policy in the compute farm, wherein performing the corrective action includes delaying the performance of the corrective action so that the corrective action is performed during a working day.