Queues and resource allocation

The thing about queues is that, in general, you don't have to worry about them. Ideally you only specify resources for the job you are about to submit. In doing so you provide enough information to the scheduler to decide in which queue the job belongs in. Hence, you explicitly allocate resources and implicitly choose a queue. However, in some cases, namely when it comes to the problem of running a job on, say, particular hardware components of the cluster, it is beneficial to know the resources that need to be allocated in order to access a proper queue running on that component.

Albeit you (as a user) should worry more about specifying resources instead of targeting queues it is useful to disentangle the relationship between certain queues that are implemented on the HPC system and the resources that need to be specified in order for the scheduler to address that queue. Also some of you might be familiar with the concept of queues and prefer to think in terms of them.

Now, thinking in terms of queues, you might be interested to see which queues there are on the HPC system. Logged in to your HPC account, you obtain a full list of all possible queues a job might be placed in by typing the command qconf -sql.