This was detected in bug 5579 as a related but separate issue. Core of the problem is heterogeneous job components belonging to a single hetjob can each of them request up to the total amount of available resources. For example, if we have a 10 node cluster, and we request a hetjob like -N10 : -N1, first component will reserve all the available nodes but will never start because second component will not be able to reserve resources and the whole hetjob cannot start until all the components have a start time and are all runnable. This leaves the queue in a blocked state and currently needs manual intervention: alex@ibiza:~/t$ sinfo PARTITION AVAIL TIMELIMIT NODES STATE NODELIST p1* up infinite 10 idle compute[1-10] alex@ibiza:~/t$ sbatch -N10 : -N1 --wrap "sleep 99999" Submitted batch job 20028 alex@ibiza:~/t$ squeue --start JOBID PARTITION NAME USER ST START_TIME NODES SCHEDNODES NODELIST(REASON) 20028+0 p1 wrap alex PD 2018-08-31T17:30:08 10 compute[1-10] (None) 20028+1 p1 wrap alex PD 2018-09-01T17:30:00 1 compute1 (None) alex@ibiza:~/t$ sbatch --wrap "sleep 9999" Submitted batch job 20030 alex@ibiza:~/t$ squeue JOBID PARTITION NAME USER ST TIME NODES NODELIST(REASON) 20028+1 p1 wrap alex PD 0:00 1 (None) 20030 p1 wrap alex PD 0:00 1 (Priority) 20028+0 p1 wrap alex PD 0:00 10 (None) alex@ibiza:~/t$
(In reply to Alejandro Sanchez from comment #0) > This was detected in bug 5579 as a related but separate issue. Core of the > problem is heterogeneous job components belonging to a single hetjob can > each of them request up to the total amount of available resources. Note that "available resources" here can include not just nodes on the cluster, but 1. Resources in a specific partition (when multiple hetjob components are submitted to the same partition) 2. GRES when specified as a total count for the job (e.g. two hetjob components specify "--gpus=16" which exceeds the total available on the partition) 3. Licenses 4. Burst buffer space 5. Global limits (total node count for a user, QOS, etc.) This will be difficult to detect, at least for most of these cases. Ideally this can detected at submit time, then we could reject the job. Otherwise holding the job is probably the best option.