[slurm-users] Automatically converting jobs to regular priority when high-priority is exhausted

[Ebbert, Mark T.]

Hello,

I’m a SLURM user (not administrator) so I may not use the correct terms, but hopefully I can get my question across.

Ultimate question: Is there a way to have SLURM automatically convert job submissions from a “high-priority” account to regular priority when that account’s submissions have been maxed out? If not, is there a way to request such a feature?

More background: Essentially, my lab as two accounts that we can use on our campus cluster. One is given higher priority in the queue because we directly funded a certain number of compute nodes, while the other has regular priority. Once we exhaust the number of job units allotted to our high-priority account, any new jobs submitted from that account get straight-up rejected from the scheduler. We don’t want to have to track how many units we’ve used from a certain account and then switch to a different account. We’d like to always be able to submit under a single account and let SLURM first use our allotted high-priority units, but once those are used up, simply set the rest of the jobs as regular priority (and not reject them).

We use Nextflow to manage our job submissions, so in the middle of a large and complicated run, all of our jobs start getting rejected. Going through our scripts, etc. and changing accounts is a waste of time and error prone. It’s gotten to the point where we’re only submitting jobs under our regular account so we don’t have to deal with our jobs getting rejected, which defeats the purpose of buying into the high-priority to begin with.

Thanks for your help.

____________________________________________

Mark T. W. Ebbert, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
University of Kentucky
Sanders-Brown Center on Aging
545 Lee T. Todd Jr. Building
Lexington, KY 40536
859.218.0125<tel:859-218-0125>
ebbertlab.com

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