[slurm-users] Change ExcNodeList on a running job

[Riebs, Andy]

Geoffrey,

A lot depends on what you mean by “failure on the current machine”. If it’s a failure that Slurm recognizes as a failure, Slurm can be configured to remove the node from the partition, and you can follow Rodrigo’s suggestions for the requeue options.

If the user job simply decides it’s unhappy with the node, but Slurm doesn’t see a problem, they could have the job resubmit itself via sbatch, with the problem node(s) excluded. (Or, a horrible option, you could grant sudo privileges for the user to run scontrol so that the user could drain the problem nodes -- but the situations where this would be a good solution are rare!)

Andy

From: slurm-users [mailto:slurm-users-bounces at lists.schedmd.com] On Behalf Of Rodrigo Santibáñez
Sent: Thursday, June 4, 2020 4:16 PM
To: Slurm User Community List <slurm-users at lists.schedmd.com>
Subject: Re: [slurm-users] Change ExcNodeList on a running job

Hello,

Jobs can be requeue if something wrong happens, and the node with failure excluded by the controller.

--requeue
Specifies that the batch job should eligible to being requeue. The job may be requeued explicitly by a system administrator, after node failure, or upon preemption by a higher priority job. When a job is requeued, the batch script is initiated from its beginning. Also see the --no-requeue option. The JobRequeue configuration parameter controls the default behavior on the cluster.

Also, jobs can be run selecting a specific node or excluding nodes

-w, --nodelist=<node name list>
Request a specific list of hosts. The job will contain all of these hosts and possibly additional hosts as needed to satisfy resource requirements. The list may be specified as a comma-separated list of hosts, a range of hosts (host[1-5,7,...] for example), or a filename. The host list will be assumed to be a filename if it contains a "/" character. If you specify a minimum node or processor count larger than can be satisfied by the supplied host list, additional resources will be allocated on other nodes as needed. Duplicate node names in the list will be ignored. The order of the node names in the list is not important; the node names will be sorted by Slurm.

-x, --exclude=<node name list>
Explicitly exclude certain nodes from the resources granted to the job.

does this help?

El jue., 4 jun. 2020 a las 16:03, Ransom, Geoffrey M. (<Geoffrey.Ransom at jhuapl.edu<mailto:Geoffrey.Ransom at jhuapl.edu>>) escribió:

Hello
   We are moving from Univa(sge) to slurm and one of our users has jobs that if they detect a failure on the current machine they add that machine to their exclude list and requeue themselves. The user wants to emulate that behavior in slurm.

It seems like “scontrol update job ${SLURM_JOB_ID} ExcNodeList $NEWExcNodeList” won’t work on a running job, but it does work on a job pending in the queue. This means the job can’t do this step and requeue itself to avoid running on the same host as before.

Our user wants his jobs to be able to exclude the current node and requeue itself.
Is there some way to accomplish this in slurm?
Is there a requeue counter of some sort so a job can see if it has requeued itself more than X times and give up?

Thanks.
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