sequenceGeek's questions

Background:

I use a computing cluster at work (4 slave nodes and 1 head node) that uses the SGE job scheduler. Recently we've been running jobs that do some heavy IO and it has been slowing down shell/vim usage (small IO, but we need it running smoothly 24/7). I found ionice, and it seems like a perfect solution for one computer, but I'm not sure it will be helpful on a cluster...

Question:

If I run a process (let's say vim) through the head node with a ionice setting (-c2 -n0), will it still have any priority over processes on other computers (high IO on slaves -c2 -n4) to the shared HD?

Thanks for your time!

Background:

I use a cluster with my coworkers and if anyone writes too many big files at the same time I can't even move the cursor in vim (the horror!). I'm not sure if it is more related to the number of files open or the "bandwith" of hard drive being used but it definitely only happens when a big write operation is taking place (including downloading big files). I know you can limit hard drive space by quotas per user, but I've never heard of being able to limit data transfer speeds.

Question

Is it possible to limit the amount of data written per second by a user in linux?