[slurm-users] Determining Cluster Usage Rate

Juergen Salk juergen.salk at uni-ulm.de
Sat May 15 21:54:09 UTC 2021


* Christopher Samuel <chris at csamuel.org> [210514 15:47]:

> > Usage reported in Percentage of Total
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> >    Cluster      TRES Name    Allocated     Down PLND Dow        Idle
> > Reserved     Reported
> > --------- -------------- ------------ -------- -------- -----------
> > -------- ------------
> >        oph            cpu       81.93%    0.00%    0.00%      15.85%
> > 2.22%      100.00%
> >        oph            mem       80.60%    0.00%    0.00%      19.40%
> > 0.00%      100.00%
> 
> The "Reserved" column is the one you're interested in, it's indicating that
> for the 13th some jobs were waiting for CPUs, not memory.

Hi Chris,

the wording in the documentation is somewhat nebulous, but my
understanding is that the "Reserved" column in sreport indicates the
amount of resources that were actually idle but reserved by Slurm for
scheduling purposes and, thus, unavailable for immediate job
allocations. I assume this includes, for example, the time the
scheduler needs to free sufficient resources for the highest priority
job that is waiting for the number of requested nodes to become
available. I think, there might be more reasons for Slurm to mark
resources reserved (but not including resource reservations created
with scontrol as these are reported as "Allocated" resources by
sreport unless created with MAINT or IGNORE_JOBS flags).

Anyway, as far as I understand the documentation, the sreport
"Reserved" column by itself does not necessarily indicate the degree
of (over-)utilitzation of the cluster as it does not take into account
the amount of jobs in the queue for which Slurm has not yet started 
blocking idle resources. So, confusingly, there is a difference between
"Reserved" in sreport and sacct. In sreport "Reserved" refers to idle
but reserved cluster resources whereas in sacct "Reserved" means the
waiting time of jobs. Or do I understand this wrong? 

However, there is also "Overcommited" in the sreport man page which
looks promising by description - although its exact definition 
is also not completely clear to me right away:

--- snip ---

Overcommited  

   Time of eligible jobs waiting in the queue over the Reserved time.
   Unlike Reserved, this has no limit. It is typically useful to
   determine whether your system is overloaded and by how much.

--- snip ---

This field is not included by default in the report but can be added with 
the Format option, e.g. 

sreport  -t percent -T ALL cluster utilization Format=TRESName,Allocated,PlannedDown,Down,Idle,Reserved,Overcommitted,Reported

(Note: There seems to be a typo in the scontrol man page. It should read
"Overcommitted" rather than "Overcommited".)

Best regards
Jürgen





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