BYU

Office of Research Computing

Deprecated by SLURM

Commands

Job Submission

Jobs are submitted using the qsub command. Generally it takes the form of qsub $jobscript Where $jobscript represents the script you are submitting, which contains all the resource requirements, etc.

When a job is successfully submitted, the qsub command will return a job designator, which is made up of a job number, and the hostname of the scheduling system. For example:

		
$ qsub myscript
4875700.fslsched.fsl.byu.edu
		
	

This job number (4875700, in this example) can be used in other commands to check on a job's status, or remove a job before it is done running.

Sometimes qsub will return an error message stating that there is a problem with your job. For example, if your job fails to request the memory it needs, you might see this message:

Your job could not be submitted, due to the following error:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Your job has failed to request memory, which is required of all jobs.  For
  more information, see https://rc.byu.edu/memoryrequests.php
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you believe this is in error, feel free to open a support ticket via our
website at https://rc.byu.edu/ticket/.  Please include details about your
resource request.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
qsub: Your job has been administratively rejected by the queueing system.
qsub: There may be a more detailed explanation prior to this notice.

System Status

The best command to use to check on the status of the system overall is showq. It will list all jobs in the system, what state they are in (running, eligible, blocked, etc.), the users who own them, etc. The output is relatively long, so you may wish to redirect the output to a screen paging tool, using something like this:

showq | less

You can generally use the arrow-keys, Page-Up/Page-Down, etc., to move around within the "less" paging tool. When you are done, press q to exit.

You can limit the output of showq based on username and other features:

showq -u $username (Where $username is your username)
Will show only your jobs.
showq -r
Will show only the jobs that are running.
showq -i
Will show only eligible jobs
showq -b
Will show only blocked jobs.

Job Status

You can check on the status of a particular job using checkjob $jobnumber, where $jobnumber is the assigned job number of your job. This will give you the state of the job (running, idle, etc.), the list of resources requested, the assigned nodes, etc. If you want more detail, add the -v option to the checkjob command.

Job Deletion

You can remove a job from the system by typing qdel $jobnumber, where $jobnumber is the assigned job number of your job. If the system can delete your job successfully, there will be no output to this command. If an error occurs, it will show on your screen.