[slurm-users] new user simple question re sacct output line2

[Paddy Doyle]

Hi Matt,

I think you're asking about the difference between Job, Step, and Task.
There's an overview of the job launch system here:

https://slurm.schedmd.com/job_launch.html

..but this stack overflow post actually summarises it nicely:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/46532581

  A job consists in one or more steps, each consisting in one or more tasks
  each using one or more CPU.

  Jobs are typically created with the sbatch command, steps are created with
  the srun command, tasks are requested (at the job level or the step level)
  with --ntasks and CPUs are requested per task with --cpus-per-task. Note
  that jobs submitted with sbatch have one implicit step; the Bash script
  itself.


So I think what you're asking about is the implicit step of the bash script
itself. It can show overall stats, such as the overall time elapsed. But it
may indeed have different values to some of the steps (e.g. if you ask for
40 CPUs but then do an 'srun -n 10 something' as one of the steps, then the
AllocCPUS field would be different.

A lot of the fields may well be blank, if you didn't specify certain
parameters in your sbatch file, or if accounting is not enabled, or if
there is no value for that job step.

So in your example below, the '82' is the implicit step for the bash file,
and '82.batch' is the command in the batch file.

Hope that helps.

Paddy

On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 01:38:54PM +0000, Matthew Goulden wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> 
> New to slurm; currently working up to move our system from uge/sge
> 
> 
> sacct output including the default headers is three lines, What is line 2 documenting? Most fields are blank.
> 
> 
> For most fields with values these are the same as for line 3:
> 
> AllocCPUS,
> Elapsed,
> State,
> ExitCode,
> ReqMem,
> 
> For some fields with values these are clearly related to that in line 3 (represented here as line1:line2:line3)
> JobID    :     82    :      82.batch
> JobIDRaw    :     82    :      82.batch
> 
> 
> For others the values are uniq to line 2:
> 
> JobName    :     <jobName assigned to -J in sbatch script> :     batch
> 
> Partition    :     all_slt_limit    :
> 
> ReqCPUFreqMin    :     Unknown    :      0
> ReqCPUFreqMax    :     Unknown    :      0
> ReqCPUFreqGov    :     Unknown    :      0
> 
> ReqTRES    :     billing=1,cpu=1,node=1    :
> AllocTRES    :     billing=1,cpu=1,mem=125000M,node=1    :      cpu=1,mem=125000M,node=1
> 
> 
> I'm sure the documentation - which is excellent - details this but I've not found where; can someone give me the pointer I need?
> 
> 
> Many thanks
> 
> 
> Matt
> 
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-- 
Paddy Doyle
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing,
Lloyd Building, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
Phone: +353-1-896-3725
http://www.tchpc.tcd.ie/