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Estimation Tool Overview

The Estimation Tool is an interactive planning aid in the Execution Profile Editor. It helps you model workload scenarios, compare configured budget values with estimated workload usage and available worker-node capacity, and choose more suitable Budget CPU and Budget Memory values for your execution profile.

Note

The Estimation Tool is intended as a planning aid only and does not guarantee that Altair SLC Hub will behave exactly as shown.

For step-by-step instructions, see Using the Estimation Tool.

Limitations

Warning

The Estimation Tool is designed to help with planning and estimation. It has some important limitations:

  • It is not a live monitoring tool.
  • It does not use historical workload statistics.
  • It does not guarantee runtime behavior or performance.
  • It does not exactly simulate all scheduler decisions.
  • It does not automatically determine the correct values for your environment.

Use the tool to explore possible workload patterns and estimate suitable resource budget values, not as an exact prediction of what will happen in production.

Why use the Estimation Tool?

Choosing suitable resource budget values for an execution profile can be difficult. In many cases, it may not be immediately clear:

  • what the budget values represent
  • when the default values are sufficient
  • when it makes sense to adjust them
  • which values are appropriate for a given workload mix
  • why workloads may queue or fail in some scenarios

The Estimation Tool helps you explore different workload patterns and worker-node selections so you can make more informed decisions about Budget CPU and Budget Memory.

What the tool models

The Estimation Tool compares three things:

  • Budgeted resources: the configured per-workload CPU and memory values
  • Maximum available resources: the total CPU and memory available from the selected worker nodes
  • Simulated workload usage: the estimated actual usage of the workloads you configure in the tool

This helps you understand whether your current resource budget is likely to:

  • allow workloads to run without delay
  • cause workloads to queue
  • risk resource exhaustion
  • reserve more resources than necessary

Budgeted usage and actual usage

A workload does not always use exactly the same amount of CPU or memory as its configured budget.

In the Estimation Tool:

  • Budget shows the total resource demand implied by the configured per-workload budget
  • Simulated shows the estimated actual resource usage of the simulated workloads
  • Max shows the total available capacity from the selected worker nodes

This distinction is important:

  • If Simulated is greater than Budget, workloads may consume more resources than expected at runtime.
  • If Budget exceeds Max, some workloads may queue until resources become available.
  • If Budget is much greater than Simulated, capacity may be allocated more generously than necessary, which can cause workloads to queue earlier than needed and reduce throughput.

Understanding warnings

The Estimation Tool highlights scenarios that may need attention.

Budget exceeds maximum capacity

If the projected budgeted demand is higher than the available capacity from the selected worker nodes, some workloads may be queued until resources become available.

Estimated actual usage exceeds available memory

If simulated actual memory usage exceeds available memory, workloads may fail due to out-of-memory conditions.

Worker-node selection in the tool

The worker nodes selected in the Estimation Tool are used to model available capacity for a scenario.

They do not reflect constraints configured elsewhere in the execution profile.

This means the tool may show worker nodes that are outside the execution profile’s current constraints. This is intentional: the tool is designed to support scenario testing and experimentation, rather than to reproduce the current execution configuration exactly.