watching memory in PBS - memory

I'm running a job on a cluster (using PBS) that runs out of memory. I'm trying to print the memory status for each node separately while my other job is running. I created a shell script and included a call to that script from inside my job submission script. But when I'm submitting my job it gives me permission denied error on the line that calls the script. I don't understand why do I get that error.
Secondly, I was thinking that I can have a 'watch free' or 'watch ps aux' in my script file but now I'm thinking if that will cause my submitted job to get stuck in memory-watching script and never continue to get to the main line that calls my parallel program.
After all, how can I achieve logging my memory in PBS for the jobs I'm submitting. My code is a C++ program using MRMPI (MPI MapReduce) library.

To see how much memory is being used throughout the job, run qstat -f:
$ qstat -f | grep used
resources_used.cput = 00:02:51
resources_used.energy_used = 0
resources_used.mem = 6960kb
resources_used.vmem = 56428kb
resources_used.walltime = 00:01:26
To examine past jobs you can look in the accounting file. This is located in the server_priv/accounting directory, the default is /var/spool/torque/server_priv/accounting/.
The entries look like this:
09/14/2015 10:52:11;E;202.napali;user=dbeer group=company jobname=intense.sh queue=batch ctime=1442248534 qtime=1442248534 etime=1442248534 start=1442248536 owner=dbeer#napali exec_host=napali/0-2 Resource_List.neednodes=1:ppn=3 Resource_List.nodect=1 Resource_List.nodes=1:ppn=3 session=20415 total_execution_slots=3 unique_node_count=1 end=0 Exit_status=0 resources_used.cput=1989 resources_used.energy_used=0 resources_used.mem=9660kb resources_used.vmem=58500kb resources_used.walltime=995

NOTE: if your ssh access to computing nodes of the cluster is closed, this method won't work!
This is how I ended up doing this. It might not be the best way but it works:
In summary, I added some short sleep periods in between my map and reduce steps by calling c++ sleep() function. And also wrote a script that ssh's to the nodes my job is running on and then gets the memory status on those nodes writing them in a file (using 'free' or 'top' commands).
More detailed: in my PBS job script, somewhere before the call to my binary, I added this line:
#this goes in job script, before the call to the job binary:
cat $PBS_NODEFILE > /some/path/nodelist.log
This writes a list of the nodes that my job runs on, into a file.
I have a second script "watchmem.sh":
#!/bin/bash
for i in $(seq 60)
do
while read line;
do
ssh $line 'bash -s' < /some/path/remote.sh "$line"
done < /some/path/nodelist.log
sleep 10
done
This script reads the file nodelist.log that we generated before, performs an ssh into each node and calls a third (and last script), remote.sh, on each of those nodes.
remote.sh contains the commands that we run on every node of our job. In this case it prints the current time and the result of 'free' into separate files for each node:
#remote.sh
echo "Current time : $(date)" >> $1
free >> $1 #this can be replaced by top by specifying a -n for it
Comparing the times from these files and the times I'm printing from my binary let's me find out the memory consumption (alloc/dealloc) in each step.
The sleep periods in my job is to make sure my scripts capture the memory status in between steps. 'sleep 10' in my script is to avoid unnecessary writes to the file; this period should be comparable to the sleep duration in the main job.

Related

Limit the docker containers executed in a loop

I am very new to docker, have created a Dockerfile to create an image that executes the protractor tests.
That Dockerfile has an entry point that expects a parameter with Suite Name that I want to execute.
It all runs very well when I provide suite names in the command line.
I have about 30 test suites, I am using another .sh file which filters out suite names, and in a for loop, it runs docker commands with different suite names.
Now I do not want to sun 30 suites simultaneously but want to set a limit of say 6 at a time and want to keep others waiting until one is finished.
I execute like this:
for (( i=0; i<${tests}; i++ ));
do
docker run -dit containername $testSuiteName
done
So how can I limit the maximum number of executions at a time?
There are going to be a number of ways of tackling this problem. Here
is one possible solution.
You can treat this as a shell scripting problem, rather than a Docker problem. For example, consider the following, which instead of docker run ... just uses sleep:
#!/bin/sh
let count=5
let tests=20
for (( i=0; i<tests; i++ )); do
sleep $((RANDOM % 10)) &
echo "started $!"
let count--
if (( count <= 0 )); then
wait -n
let count++
fi
done
echo "waiting for remaining jobs"
wait
echo "all done"
This starts $count processes in parallel, and then waits for one to
exit. When a process exits, it immediately starts a new one. Once it
has started all the jobs, it simply waits for everything to finish.
Using this model, you would drop the -d from your docker run
command line, since you need the shell to track the background
processes. Instead of sleep ... &, you would run:
docker run containername $testSuiteName > /dev/null 2>&1 &
Note that I've dropped the -i and -t options here, since it looks like
you're running these tests non-interactively.
A few more possible solutions:
If you run your tests in jenkins, you can create a job that runs one test suite. Set the max number of executors to 6. And start as many tests as you want. Now jenkins won't let run more than 6 jobs at a time.
This is I think the ideal and most correct approach, yet most difficult one. You can use an orchestrator as kubernetes. This actually controls all your docker image. Unfortunately, I don't have step by step guide how to achieve. But this is really the most professional way to tackle your problem

GNU parallel: deleting line from joblog breaks parallel updating it

If you run GNU parallel with --joblog path/to/logfile and then delete a line from said logfile while parallel is running, GNU parallel is no longer able to append future completed jobs to it.
Execute this MWE:
#!/usr/bin/bash
parallel -j1 -n0 --joblog log sleep 1 ::: $(seq 10) &
sleep 5 && sed -i '$ d' log
If you tail -f log prior to execution, you can see that parallel keeps writing to this file. However, if you cat log after 10 seconds, you will see that nothing was written to the actual file now on disk after the third entry or so.
What's the reason behind this? Is there a way to delete something from the file and have GNU parallel be able to still write to it?
Some background as to why this happened:
Using GNU parallel, I started a few jobs on remote machines with --sshloginfile. I then needed to pkill a few jobs on one of the machines because a colleague needed to use it (and I subsequently removed the machine from the sshloginfile so that parallel wouldn't reuse it for new runs). If you pkill those processes started on the remote machine, they get an Exitval of 0 (it looks like they finished without issues; you can't tell that they were killed). I wanted to remove them immediately from the joblog so that when I restart parallel --resume later, parallel can have a look at the joblog and determine what's missing.
Turns out, this was a bad idea, as now my joblog is useless.
While #MarkSetchell is absolutely right in his comment, root problem here is due to man sed lying:
-i[SUFFIX], --in-place[=SUFFIX]
edit files in place (makes backup if SUFFIX supplied)
sed -i does not edit files in place.
What it does is to make a temporary file in the same dir, copy the input file to the temporary file while doing the editing, and finally renaming the temporary file to the input file's name. Similar to this:
sed '$ d' log > sedXxO11P
mv sedXxO11P log
It is clear that the original log and sedXxO11P have different inodes - let us call them ino1 and ino2. GNU Parallel has ino1 open and really does not know about the existence of ino2. GNU Parallel will happily append to ino1 completely unaware that when it closes the file, the file will vanish because it has already been unlinked.
So you need to change the content of the file without changing the inode:
#!/usr/bin/bash
seq 10 | parallel -j1 -n0 --joblog log sleep 1 &
sleep 5
# Obvious race condition here:
# Anything appended to log before sed is done is lost.
# This can be avoided by suspending parallel while running this
tmp=$RANDOM$$
cp log $tmp
(rm $tmp; sed '$ d' >log) < $tmp
wait
cat log
This works right now. But do not expect this to be a supported feature - ever.

How do I capture output from one Rundeck step to be used in a later step?

I'm attempting to build, launch, and link a set of docker containers using Rundeck. In short (for those not familiar with docker), when an image is launched, it returns a container ID. I would like to use this container ID in the launching of subsequent jobs.
When run from the command line, it would look something like this (example only!!):
# docker run -Pd 23ABCD45
34DEF123
# docker run -Pd --link 34DEF123:host1 ABC123EF
321CB456
(note the use of the first return value in the second command line)
At this point, there would be two containers running. The second would be linked to the first by the --link option, and it would be addressable using the hostname host1 from inside the second container. To be fair, docker generates (or may be given) a specific container name which can be used in place of the container id. I would prefer to use the container ID to avoid the hassle of having to create/track unique names.
I would like to be able to capture the output of the first command (the container ID) so that it can be reused in the second command. Is this possible?
Edit: These images are being used for testing immediately following a
"docker build" (which also outputs a similar ID I would like to
include in my chain) and might be followed by "docker rm" and "docker
rmi" commands, so there are a number of uses for capturing this type
of output and carrying it through a related set of operations. This
is not just about launching/linking containers.
There is no direct Rundeck implementation that allows you pass an output from one job to another job as an input, but there are work around I've tried in the past, and I've settled on the second approach.
1. Use a file to pass data
Save the ID/output into a tmp file in first job
Second job read that file
Things might go wrong since you depend on a file, but good code can improve.
2. Call two jobs using Rundeck CLI from another job
This is the approach I am using.
JobA printout two random numbers.
echo $RANDOM;echo $RANDOM
JobB print out the second random produced from JobA which is passed as an option "number"
echo "$RD_OPTION_NUMBER is the number JobB received"
JobC calls first job, save last line to a variable and pass it to JobB
#!/bin/bash
OUTPUT_FROM_JOB_A=`run -f --id <ID of JobA> | tail -n 1`
run -f --id <ID of JobB> -- -number $OUTPUT_FROM_JOB_A
Output:
[5394] execution status: succeeded
Job execution started:
[5395] JobB <https://hostname:4443/project/Project/execution/show/5395>
6186 is the number JobB received
[5395] execution status: succeeded
This is just primitive code sample. you can do alot with python subprocess or just use bash.

Ensuring all .sh curl download scripts download using gnu parallel

I'm executing the following command which executes a group of scripts with each script being a curl download.
parallel --resume-failed --joblog logshd.log {1} ::: SH/*.sh
The set of files downloaded is quite large. I've noticed some files don't download.
I hoped that the resume-failed parameter would ensure that all the downloads that fail resume and complete.
I'm not clear on if that means I need to run the process again a second time or if that should occur when I run the one time.
From the gnu documentation
Where --resume-failed reads the commands from the command line (and
ignores the commands in the joblog), --retry-failed ignores the
command line and reruns the commands mentioned in the joblog.
I'm not clear on what ignoring the command line or ignores the commands in the job log means. Could that be clarified.
Can --resume-failed and --retry-failed be declared within the same command and if so what is the effect of that?
Regards
Conteh
If we assume the download fails intermittently then your answer is --retries 10. It will run the command 10 times before giving up.
--resume-failed and --retry-failed are both used when GNU Parallel has finished, and you then figure out that you want to retry some of the jobs again.
The difference between the two is in how to retry the command.
--retry-failed will run exactly the same command as failed before. It does that by looking in the joblog for the command. This is typically what you want.
--resume-failed is used if you figure out that the failing command actually needed some other parameter: i.e. GNU Parallel should not run exactly the same command, but it should run a (typically slightly changed) command with the same parameters instead.

To use lsf bsub command without all the verbosity output

My problem is that: I have a bash script that do something and then call 800 bsub jobs like this:
pids=
rm -f ~/.count-*
for i in `ls _some_files_`; do
of=~/.count-${i}
bsub -I "grep _something_ $i > $of" &
pids="${!} ${pids}"
done
wait ${pids}
Then the scripts process the output files $of and echo the results.
The trouble is that I got a lot of lines like:
Job <7536> is submitted to default queue <interactive>.
<<Waiting for dispatch ...>>
<<Starting on hostA>>
It's actually 800 times the 3 lines above. Is there a way of suppressing this LSF lines?
I've tried in the loop above:
bsub -I "grep _something_ $i > $of" &> /dev/null
I does remove the LSF verbosity but instead of submitting almost all 800 jobs at once and then take less than 4 min to run, it submits just few jobs at a time and I have to wait more than an hour for the script to finish.
AFAIK lsf bsub doesn't seem to have a option to surpress all this verbosity. What can I do here?
You can suppress this output by setting the environment variable BSUB_QUIET to any value (including empty) before your bsub. So, before your loop say you could add:
export BSUB_QUIET=
Then if you want to return it back to normal you can clear the variable with:
unset BSUB_QUIET
Hope that helps you out.
Have you considered using job dependencies and post-process the logfiles?
1) Run each "child" job (removing the "-Is") and output the IO to separate output file. Each job should be submitted with a jobname (see -J). the jobname could form an array.
2) Your final job would be dependent on the children finishing (see -w).
Besides running concurrent across the cluster, another advantage of this approach is that your overall process is not susceptible to IO issues.

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