Overview
This page will help researchers pull system usage information about the running and completed jobs.
Running Jobs
For currently running jobs, seff/sacct will not pull accurate stattitiscs. To see the current CPU, Memory, and GPU usage, you will need to connect to the node.
If you have a sbatch script running, you can use the myjobs command to find the node the job is running on. Look for the NODELIST section.
jeburks2@login02:~]$ myjobs JobID ... PARTITION/QOS NAME STATE ... Node/Core/GPU NODELIST(REASON) 11273558 ... general/public myjob RUNNING ... 1/1/NA c008
In the example above, the job is running on node c008. We will then connect directly to that node with ssh
You can only ssh to nodes you have a job running on, otherwise the ssh connection will fail. When you ssh to a node, you are joining the cgroup on that node that runs your job
[jeburks2@login02:~]$ ssh c008 [jeburks2@c008:~]$
Notice the bash prompt changed from username@login02 to username@c008, indicating we are on node c008 now. We can now use the following commands to view information about our job
top -u $USER ##This will show the CPU and Memory of our job
top - 15:12:17 up 62 days, 16:04, 6 users, load average: 83.96, 83.95, 83.37
Tasks: 1490 total, 7 running, 1483 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 63.6 us, 0.8 sy, 0.0 ni, 35.2 id, 0.1 wa, 0.3 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 52768358+total, 43774208+free, 44024912 used, 45916584 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 4194300 total, 1393524 free, 2800776 used. 47617328+avail Mem
PID PPID USER PR VIRT RES SHR SWAP DATA TIME S %CPU %MEM nMaj nMin COMMAND P nDRT CODE UID GID TIME+ RUSER WCHAN nTH NI Flags TTY OOMs ENVIRON
931372 928130 jeburks2 20 7162680 1.0g 341492 0 1145200 0:07 S 69.1 0.2 138 191k /packag+ 125 0 144 1724+ 9999+ 0:07.10 jeburks2 - 44 0 4...4... ? 668 SLURM_M+
931369 929093 jeburks2 20 67228 7016 4456 0 3072 0:00 R 1.0 0.0 0 828 top -u + 101 0 108 1724+ 9999+ 0:00.34 jeburks2 - 1 0 ....4... pts/0 666 LS_COLO+
928130 928126 jeburks2 20 12868 3100 2908 168 536 5:02 S 0.0 0.0 516 1417 /bin/ba+ 125 0 1056 1724+ 9999+ 5:02.62 jeburks2 - 1 0 ....41.. ? 666 LS_COLO+
929092 929086 jeburks2 20 175560 5592 4208 0 1232 0:00 S 0.0 0.0 0 175 sshd: j+ 99 0 824 1724+ 9999+ 0:00.01 jeburks2 - 1 0 ....414. ? 666 -
929093 929092 jeburks2 20 24656 4516 3420 0 1196 0:00 S 0.0 0.0 0 2805 -bash 100 0 1056 1724+ 9999+ 0:00.70 jeburks2 - 1 0 ....4... pts/0 666 LANG=en+
This shows the processes and their CPU / Memory usage. CPU usage is a percentage. 100% CPU is 1 CPU core, so if a process is using 8 cores it may say 800%, or list 8 processes at 100%
Press q to quit out of top
nvtop ## This will display GPU usage for our job, this only works on GPU nodes
Device 0 [NVIDIA A100-SXM4-80GB] PCIe GEN 4@16x RX: 1.089 GiB/s TX: 1.178 GiB/s GPU 1410MHz MEM 1593MHz TEMP 38°C FAN N/A% POW 116 / 500 W GPU[||||||||||||||| 44%] MEM[ 1.238Gi/80.000Gi]
Here we can clearly see the GPU Usage % and GPU Memory usage.
Press F10 to exit out of nvtop
When done viewing job statistics, type exit to return to the login node
[jeburks2@c008:~]$ exit logout Connection to c008 closed. [jeburks2@login02:~]$
Completed Jobs
Once a job has completed/canceled/failed, pulling the job statistics is rather simple. There are two main commands to do this: seff and mysacct
Seff
seff is short for “slurm efficiency” and will display the percentage of CPU and Memory used by a job relative to how long the job ran. The goal is high efficiency so that jobs are not allocating resources they are not using.
Example of seff for an inefficient job
[jeburks2@login02:~]$ seff 11273084 Job ID: 11273084 Cluster: sol User/Group: jeburks2/grp_rcadmins State: COMPLETED (exit code 0) Cores: 1 CPU Utilized: 00:00:59 CPU Efficiency: 12.55% of 00:07:50 core-walltime Job Wall-clock time: 00:07:50 Memory Utilized: 337.73 MB Memory Efficiency: 16.85% of 2.00 GB [jeburks2@login02:~]$
This shows the job had a CPU for 7 minutes, but only used the CPU for 59 seconds, resulting in a 12% efficiency, but did use the memory
Example of sef for a CPU efficient job
[jeburks2@login02:~]$ seff 11273083 Job ID: 11273083 Cluster: sol User/Group: jeburks2/grp_rcadmins State: TIMEOUT (exit code 0) Nodes: 1 Cores per node: 4 CPU Utilized: 00:59:39 CPU Efficiency: 98.98% of 01:00:16 core—wall time Job Wall—clock time: 00:15:04 Memory Utilized: 337.73 MB Memory Efficiency: 4.12% of 8.00 GB
In this example, the job used all four cores it was allocated for 98% of the time the job ran. The core-wall time is calculated by the number of CPU cores * the length of the job. This 15-minute job with 4 CPUs had a core-wall time of 1:00:00. However, the memory efficiency is rather low. This lets us know that if we run this job in the future, we can allocate less memory. This will reduce the impact to our fair share and use the system more efficiently.
Note: Seff does not display statists for GPUs, so a GPU-heavy job will likely have inaccurate seff results
sacct / mysacct
The sacct / mysacct command allows a user to easily pull up information about past jobs that have completed.
Specify either a job ID or username with the --jobs or --user flag, respectively to pull up all information on a job:
sacct --jobs=<jobid[,additional_jobids]> sacct --user=<username>
Some available --format variables are contained in the below table, and may be passed as a comma separated list
sacct --user=<username> --format=<var_1[,var_2,...,var_N]>
Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| Account the job ran under. |
| Allocated trackable resources (e.g. cores/RAM) |
| Average CPU time of all tasks in job. |
| Formatted (Elapsed time * core) count used |
| Jobs elapsed time formatted as DD-HH:MM:SS. |
| The job’s state |
| The id of the job. |
| The name of the job. |
| Maximum number of bytes read |
| Maximum number of bytes written |
| Maximum RAM use of all job tasks |
| The number of allocated CPUs |
| The number of allocated nodes |
| Number of tasks in a job |
| Slurm priority |
| Quality of service |
| Username of the person who ran the job |
For convenience, the command mysacct has been added to the system. This is equivalent to sacct --user=$USER --format=jobid,avecpu,maxrss,cputime,allocTRES%42,state and accepts the same flags that sacct would, e.g. --starttime=YYYY-MM-DD or --endtime=YYYY-MM-DD.
Examples for better understanding job hardware utilization
Note that by default, only jobs run on the current day will be listed. To search within a different period of time, use the --starttime flag. The --long flag can also be used to show a non-abbreviated version of sacct output. For example, to list detailed job characteristics for a user’s jobs since December 15th, 2020:
sacct –-user=$USER –-starttime=2020-12-15 --long
This produces a lot of output. As an example for formatted output, the following complete command will list information about jobs that ran today for a user, specifically information about the job’s id, average CPU use, maximum amount of RAM (memory) used, the core time (wall time multiplied by number of cores allocated), and the job’s state:
sacct --user=$USER --format=jobid,avecpu,maxrss,cputime,state
The above command in conjunction with appropriate --starttime filtering is very useful for understanding more efficient hardware requests for future jobs. For instance, if maxrss is 1 GB, then the default memory allocated to a job (4 GB+) is more than sufficient.
An additionally useful flag for the format is allocTRES%42 which will print the allocated “trackable resources” associated with the job with a width of 42 character, e.g. billing=1,cpu=1,mem=4G,node=1 would be printed for a 1 core job. The allocTRES field is helpful for comparing to the avecpu and maxrss values, for instance.
If a + is listed at the end of a field, then that field has likely been truncated to fit into a fixed number of characters. Consider increasing the with by appending a % followed by a number to specify a new width. For example allocTRES%42 overrides the default width to 42 characters.
Additional Help
If you require further assistance on this topic, please don't hesitate to contact the Research Computing Team. To create a support ticket, kindly send an email to rtshelp@asu.edu. For quick inquiries, you're welcome to reach out via our #rc-support Slack Channel or attend our office hours for live assistance
We also offer a series of workshops. More information here: Educational Opportunities and Workshops