Paraphrased from the Moab documentation: Deferred jobs are those placed on hold because the scheduler has determined they cannot run. This can be because a job asks for resources which do not currently exist, does not have allocations to run, is rejected by the resource manager, repeatedly fails after start up, etc. A job will remain in the deferred state, unable to run for a period of time specified by a parameter set for the scheduler software. Once this specified time has elapsed, the job is automatically released and the scheduler again attempts to schedule it.” That is, deferred jobs are not lost and will eventually run. Therefore, you will not gain anything by deleting and resubmitting jobs. However you will need to take steps in order to get such jobs released. You should first check the resources requested in your PBS script exist on the cluster. Sometimes there is a problem with the node(s) allocated to run your job or if the cluster network traffic reaches extreme levels, the