Patent ID: 8332863

Claim:
A method of facilitating determination of scheduling priorities of jobs in a processing environment, said method comprising: defining a plurality of usage shares for the processing environment, the plurality of usage shares being based on a total amount of a resource available in the processing environment across a historic period of time extending from a past time to a present time, wherein the defining the plurality of usage shares comprises: obtaining an indication of an amount of the resource that is available in the processing environment; and applying a decay function to the indicated amount of the resource that is available to obtain the total amount of the resource available across the historic period extending from the past time to the present time; allocating one or more usage shares to a user entity of the processing environment, said one or more usage shares being at least a portion of the plurality of usage shares defined for the processing environment based on a the total amount of the resource available in the processing environment across the historic period of time, and the one or more usage shares representing an amount of the resource available for use by the user entity independent of an amount of the resource consumed by other user entities of the processing environment, wherein the one or more usage shares allocated to the user entity represents a portion of the total amount of the resource available in the processing environment; and assigning a job scheduling priority to a job of the user entity to be executed, said job scheduling priority being based on how many usage shares have been allocated to the user entity and how many usage shares have been used by the user entity and is independent of historic usage of the resource by other user entities.