Dynamically Submit Qsub Jobs on SGE cluster based on cluster load - linux

I am trying to run qsub jobs on a SGE(Sun Grid Engine) cluster that supports a maximum of 688 jobs. I would like to know if there is any way to find out the total number of jobs that are currently running on the cluster so I can submit jobs based on the current cluster load.
I plan to do something like: sleep for 1 minute and check again if the number of jobs in the cluster is < 688 and then submit jobs further.
And just to clarify my question pertains to knowing the total number of jobs submitted on the cluster not just the jobs I have submitted currently.
Thanks in advance.

You can use qstat to list the jobs of all users; this with awk and wc can be used to find out the total number of jobs on the cluster:
qstat -u "*" | awk '{if ($5 == "r" || $5 == "qw") print $0;}' | wc -l
The above command also takes into account jobs that are queued and waiting to be scheduled on a compute node.
However, the cluster sysadmins could disallow users to check on jobs that don't belong to them. You can verify if you can see other user's jobs by running:
qstat -u "*"
If you know for a fact that another user is running a job and yet you can't see it while running the above command, it's most likely that the sys admins disabled that option.
Afterthought: from my understanding, you're just a regular cluster user - why are you even bothering to submit jobs this way. Why don't you just submit all the jobs that you want and if the cluster can't schedule your jobs, it will just put them in a qw state and schedule them whenever SGE feels is the most appropriate time.

Depending on how cluster is configured, using job array (-t option for qsub) would get around this limit.
I have similar limits set for maximum number of jobs a single user can submit. This limit pertains to individual instances of qsub and not single job array submission potentially many tasks (that limit is set via another configuration variable, max_aj_tasks).

Related

Cores assigned to SLURM job

Let's say I want to submit a slurm job just assigning the total amount of tasks (--ntasks=someNumber), without specifying the number of nodes and the tasks per node. Is there a way to know within the launched slurm script how many cores are assigned by slurm for each of the reserved nodes? I need to know this info to properly create a machinefile for the program I'm launching, that must be structured like this:
node02:7
node06:14
node09:3
Once the job is launched, the only way I figured out to see what cores have been allocated on the nodes is using the command:
scontrol show jobid -dd
In its output the abovementioned info is stored (together with plenty of other details).
Is there a better way to get this info?
The way the srun documentation illustrates creating a machine file is by running srun hostname. To get the output you want you could run
srun hostname -s | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2":"$1}' > $MACHINEFILE
You should check the documentation of your program to see if it accepts a machine file with repetitions rather than a suffix count. If so you can simplify the command as
srun hostname -s > $MACHINEFILE
And of course the first step is actually to make sure you indeed need a machine file in the first place as many parallel programs/libraries have Slurm support and can gather the needed information from the environment variables setup by Slurm upon job start.

PBS Pro: setting job array slot limit by the user

Using torque user can specify slot limit when submitting the job array by using the %, e.g.: qsub job.sh -t 1-20%5 will create a job array with 20 jobs, but with only 5 running simultaneously.
Currently I work with PBS Professional, but unfortunately, as far as I can see, option % is not supported. How can I achieve similar behavior as % in torque as simple as possible?

SLURM: When we reboot the node, does jobID assignments start from 0?

For example:
sacct --start=1990-01-01 -A user returns job table with latest jobID as 136, but when I submit a new job as sbatch -A user -N1 run.sh submitted bash job returns 100 which is smaller than 136. And seems like sacct -L -A user returns a list which ends with 100.
So it seems like submitted batch jobs overwrites to previous jobs' informations, which I don't want.
[Q] When we reboot the node, does jobID assignments start from 0? If yes, what should I do it to continue from latest jobID assignment before the reboot?
Thank you for your valuable time and help.
There are two main reasons why job ID's might be recycled:
the maximum job ID was reached (see MaxJobId in slurm.conf)
the Slurm controller was restarted with FirstJobId set to a new value
Other than that, Slurm will always increase the job ID's.
Note that the job information in the database is not overwrite; they have a unique ID which is different from the job ID. sacct has a -D, --duplicates option to view all jobs in the database. By default, it only shows the most recent one among all those which have the same job ID.

Slurm: Is it possible to give or change pid of the submitted job via sbatch

When we submit a job via sbatch, the pid to jobs given by incremental order. This order start from again from 1 based on my observation.
sbatch -N1 run.sh
Submitted batch job 20
//Goal is to change submitted batch job's id, if possible.
[Q1] For example there is a running job under slurm. When we reboot the node, does the job continue running? and does its pid get updated or stay as it was before?
[Q2] Is it possible to give or change pid of the submitted job with a unique id that the cluster owner want to give?
Thank you for your valuable time and help.
If the node fails, the job is requeued - if this is permitted by the JobRequeue parameter in slurm.conf. It will get the same Job ID as the previously started run since this is the only identifier in the database for managing the jobs. (Users can override requeueing with the --no-requeue sbatch parameter.)
It's not possible to change Job ID's, no.

Adding time to a running slurm job

I have a job running a linux machine managed by slurm.
Now that the job is running for a few hours I realize that I underestimated the time required for it to finish and thus the value of the --time argument I specified is not enough. Is there a way to add time to an existing running job through slurm?
Use the scontrol command to modify a job
scontrol update jobid=<job_id> TimeLimit=<new_timelimit>
Use the SLURM time format, eg. for 8 days 15 hours: TimeLimit=8-15:00:00
Requires admin privileges, on some machines.
Will be allowed to users only if the job is not running yet, on most machines.
To build on the example provided above, you can also use "+" and "-" to increment / decrement the TimeLimit.
From the [scontrol man page][https://slurm.schedmd.com/scontrol.html]:
either specify a new time limit value or precede the time and equal sign with a "+" or "-" to increment or decrement the current time limit (e.g. "TimeLimit+=30")
We regularly get requests like "I need 3 more hours for job XXXXX to finish!!!", which would translate to:
scontrol update job=XXXXX TimeLimit=+03:00:00

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