[throwaway78678]

It reminds me of my time as an undergrad in a quantum chemistry lab. I had something like 150 calculations to run (about 4h each) and therefore could only submit them to the "small" calculation queue (for jobs less than a day).

The problem was that it was essentially always used at the maximum because most people had such small jobs to run + other queues were not as efficient. Because of the inner "fighting", the HPC admin essentially blocked the possibility to have jobs pending. So first come first serve.

So basically I've set up a cron job to look prepare my jobs and look for empty slots during the night. I remember looking at results in the morning while sipping on coffee and the head of the lab congratulating me for my "dedication" as she saw I submitted jobs at 3AM!! :)

At the end of the internship, I basically had a script "assistant" that I would use to prepare the calculation jobs, unite them so I could use them on "bigger" queues, do most of the post-calculation analysis (essentially producing CSVs and graph for me).

And I am too, chasing that high to this day.