26 February 2007: Durham are first GridPP site to enable preemption.

The ScotGrid and GridPP site at the Institute of Particle Physics Phenomenology at Durham became the first GridPP site to enable preemption on their Tier-2 site this week.

Preemption allows jobs from the grid to be suspended when local users want to run jobs on the Durham cluster.

"In the past we've specifically reserved nodes for local users," said Durham site admin Mark Nelson, "but these nodes would be idle if the local users were inactive. By using preemption we can allow grid jobs to occupy the whole cluster, but suspend these jobs to offer an enhanced level of service to our local user community."

In this way Durham have increased resources offered to the grid and improved the service for local users.

Durham are the first GridPP site to have successfully enabled preemption. Technical details are avaliable on the GridPP wiki.