General queueing problems

This page is for general queueing discussion

I have moved the paragraph from the page for me-quake as it is more appropriate here. --Catherine 09:55, 22 June 2006 (BST)

I don't know a lot about queuing systems, so I can only really talk about front-end problems. 
What has annoyed me about nimbus is that it is supposed to be for running parallel jobs, yet 
whenever I submit something (usually 2-10 but sometimes up to 20 nodes, which I have to run 
with 10 nodes, 2 jobs per node which is already not ideal) it can spend literally weeks in the 
queue while hundreds of serial jobs run. This leads me to use rama because I can get a job 
running sooner, however rama is not optimised for parallel work so although they start, they 
run very slowly and I no doubt annoy all the people wanting to run serial jobs there. Is there 
any way around this? 
Jane