Hi there, we're hoping to overcome an issue where some of our users are keen on writing their own meta-schedulers, so as to try and beat the actual scheduler, but can't seemingly do as good a job as a scheduler that's been developed by people who understand scheduling (no real surprises there!), and so occasionally generate false perceptions of our systems.
One of the things our meta-scheduler writers seem unable to allow for, is jobs that remain in a "completing" state, for whatever reason. 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" ? What we're trying to avoid is the need to write a not-quite-Slurm database that stores such info by continually polling our actual Slurm database, because we don't think of ourselves as meta-scheduler writers. Here's hoping, Kevin -- Supercomputing Systems Administrator Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
