[slurm-users] Does Slurm store "time in current state" values anywhere ?

[Kevin Buckley]

On 2019/10/04 03:26, David Rhey wrote:
>>     Whilst we're not looking to provide succour to meta-scheduler writers,
>>     we can see a need for some way to present and/or make use of, a
>> 
>>         "job has been in state S for time T"
>> 
>>     or
>> 
>>         "job entered current state at time T"
>> 
>>     info.
>> 
>> 
>>     Can we access such a value from Slurm: rather, does Slurm keep track
>>     of such a value, whether or not it can currently be accessed on the
>>     "user-side" ?
>
> Hi,
> 
> What about scontrol show job <jobID> to see various things like:
> 
> SubmitTime, EligibleTime, AccrueTime etc?

Yes, but that still leaves one needing to store previous values and
compute changes, externally to the Slurm DB.

We're hoping that there's an internal variable, already inside Slurm,
that just says "Slurm saw the last state change at time T", or some
equivalent.

Then it's just a one-off query of the Slurm DB and an "apply your
logic" clause: no need to store anything additional to Slurm's DB.

Someone suggested looking at the DB row update times, but that would
depend on whether the attribute you want to check is in a row by itself,
or whether there's just one row per job/step and Slurm pushes all changes
into fields within the one row.

Of course, if there were a "Slurm saw the last state change at time T"
in that row, we'd also have the info we want.

Kevin

-- 
Supercomputing Systems Administrator
Pawsey Supercomputing Centre