As of January 6, 2025, the LAS Pronto cluster was merged into the campus-wide Nova cluster. Information here may or may not work on Nova. Please contact Research IT if you have questions.

Time Slicing¶

Most partitions on Pronto have time slicing enabled.

When a partition with time slicing has more jobs to run than resources available, jobs will take turns running in increments.

Each job runs for 2 minutes, then pauses for 2 minutes to let another job run, and then runs for another 2 minutes. This process repeats until the job is done.

This improves responsiveness and utilization by allowing more jobs to begin running sooner. Shorter-running jobs no longer have to wait in a queue behind longer-running jobs. Instead they can be run "in parallel" with the longer-running jobs, which will allow them to start and finish quicker.

However, this does mean jobs sometimes take up to twice their requested time limit to finish running.