[StarCluster] Is StarCluster still under active development?

[Tony Robinson]

Okay, I've found another bug with the load balancer which explains why 
avg_job_duration() was getting shorter and shorter.

get_qatime() initially loads the whole (3 hours) history, but after that 
sets  temp_lookback_window = self.polling_interval

The problem with this is self.polling_interval has to be much shorter 
than a job duration (it's got to be able to keep up) and the -b option 
to qacct sets "The earliest start time for jobs to be summarized,", so 
it only selects jobs that have been started recently and finished (so 
that they get into qacct) - hence they must be the very short jobs.   
Hence the cache is originally populated quite reasonably but then only 
gets updated with very short jobs, all the long ones never get into the 
cache.

As I say below, I don't think any of this code is used anyway so it 
doesn't matter too much that it's all broken.

I'll progress with my (weekend and part time) clean up and 
implementation of a true predictive load balancer.  I have both (a) mean 
and variance for all job types and (b) working code assuming that 
avg_job_duration() is correct, so it's probably only another days work 
to get solid (or a month or two of elapsed time, I'm done for this weekend).


Tony

On 01/04/16 17:01, Tony Robinson wrote:
> On 01/04/16 16:22, Rajat Banerjee wrote:
>> Regarding:
>> How about we just call qacct every 5 mins, or if the qacct buffer is 
>> empty.
>> calling qacct and getting the job stats is the first part of the load 
>> balancers loop to see what the cluster is up to. I prioritized 
>> knowing the current state, and keeping the LB running it's loop as 
>> fast as possible (2-10 seconds), so it could run in a 1-minute loop 
>> and stay roughly on-schedule. It's easy to run the whole LB loop with 
>> 5 minutes between loops with the command line arg polling_interval, 
>> if that suits your workload better. I do not mean to sound 
>> dismissive, but the command line options (with reasonable 
>> defaults)are there so you can test and tweak to your work load.
>
> Ah, I wasn't very clear.   What I mean is that we only update the 
> qacct stats every 5 minutes.   I run the main loop every 30s.
>
> But calling qacct doesn't' take any time - we could do it every 
> polling interval:
>
> root at master:~# date
> Fri Apr  1 16:54:31 BST 2016
> root at master:~# echo qacct -j -b `date +%y%m%d`$((`date +%H` - 3))`date 
> +%m`
> qacct -j -b 1604011304
> root at master:~# time  qacct -j -b `date +%y%m%d`$((`date +%H` - 
> 3))`date +%m` | wc
>   99506  224476 3307423
>
> real    0m0.588s
> user    0m0.560s
> sys    0m0.076s
> root at master:~#
>
>
> If calling qacct is slow then the update could be run at the end of 
> the loop so it would have all of the loop wait time to complete in.
>
>> Regarding:
>> Three sorts of jobs, all of which should occur in the same numbers,
>> Have you tried testing your call to qacct to see if it's returning 
>> what you want? You could modify it in your source if it's not 
>> representative of your jobs:
>> https://github.com/jtriley/StarCluster/blob/develop/starcluster/balancers/sge/__init__.py#L528
>> qacct_cmd = 'qacct -j -b ' + qatime
>
> Yes, thanks, I'm comparing to running qacct outside of the load balancer.
>
>> Obviously one size doesn't fit all here, but if you find a set of 
>> args for qacct that work better for you, let me know.
>
> At the moment I don't think that the output of qacct is used at all is 
> it?   I thought it was only used to give job stats, I don't think it's 
> really used to bring nodes up/down.
>
>
> Tony
>
> -- 
> Speechmatics is a trading name of Cantab Research Limited
> We are hiring: www.speechmatics.com/careers 
> <http:www.speechmatics.com/careers>
> Dr A J Robinson, Founder, Cantab Research Ltd
> Phone direct: 01223 794096, office: 01223 794497
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-- 
Speechmatics is a trading name of Cantab Research Limited
We are hiring: www.speechmatics.com/careers 
<https://www.speechmatics.com/careers>
Dr A J Robinson, Founder, Cantab Research Ltd
Phone direct: 01223 794096, office: 01223 794497
Company reg no GB 05697423, VAT reg no 925606030
51 Canterbury Street, Cambridge, CB4 3QG, UK
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