cgroup

Examples
Matlab
Doing large calculations in MATLAB can crash your system, because Matlab does not have any protection against taking all your machine‘s memory or CPU. The following examples show a cgroup that constrains Matlab to first 6 CPU cores and 5 GB of memory.

With systemd
~/.config/systemd/user/matlab.slice
[Slice]
AllowedCPUs=0-5
MemoryHigh=6G
Launch Matlab like this (be sure to use the right path):

$ systemd-run --user --slice=matlab.slice /opt/MATLAB/2012b/bin/matlab -desktop
With libcgroup
/etc/cgconfig.conf
group matlab {
    perm {
        admin {
            uid = username;
        }
        task {
            uid = username;
        }
    }

    cpuset {
        cpuset.mems="0";
        cpuset.cpus="0-5";
    }
    memory {
        memory.limit_in_bytes = 5000000000;
    }
}
Change username to the user Matlab is run as.

You can also restrict the CPU share with the cpu constraint.

Launch Matlab like this (be sure to use the right path):

$ cgexec -g memory,cpuset:matlab /opt/MATLAB/2012b/bin/matlab -desktop
Documentation
For information on controllers and what certain switches and tunables mean, refer to kernel‘s documentation v1 or v2 (or install linux-docs and see /usr/src/linux/Documentation/cgroup)
A detailed and complete Resource Management Guide can be found in the fedora project documentation.
For commands and configuration files, see relevant man pages, e.g. man cgcreate or man cgrules.conf