Dan is back and blogging up a storm, he recently posted a nice overview of Grid Engine queue basics. An excerpt is here:
… So, aside from governing the number of free slots on a host, what does a queue do? It controls the execution context of jobs that run in it. It determines what parallel environments are available, what file, memory, and CPU time limits should be applied, how the job should be started, stopped, suspended, and resumed, what the job’s process’ nice value is, etc. …
Read the full article here:
http://blogs.sun.com/templedf/entry/intro_to_grid_engine_queues