Query Time Remaining in Allocation

RFC0013

The RFC number will be provided upon submission.

Title

Provide a mechanism by which an application can query the resource manager to obtain the time remaining in its allocation.

Abstract

Inspired by libyogrt, this proposes a standard interface to enable an application to query the resource manager for the remaining time in its allocation. Such information is useful in order for an application to shut down gracefully before its allocation ends.

Labels

[EXTENSION]

Action

[APPROVED]

Copyright Notice

This document is subject to all provisions relating to code contributions to the PMIx community as defined in the community's LICENSE file. Code Components extracted from this document must include the License text as described in that file.

Description

Time-shared systems impose maximum run times when assigning jobs to resource allocations. To shut down gracefully, e.g., to write a checkpoint before termination, it is necessary for an application to periodically query the resource manager for the time remaining in its allocation. This is especially true on systems for which allocation times may be shortened or lengthened from the original time limit. Many resource managers provide APIs to dynamically obtain this information, but each API is specific to the resource manager, for example:

SLURM - slurm_get_rem_time()
MOAB - MCCJobGetRemainingTime()

This proposal defines a new PMIx key and semantics to provide a uniform interface to obtain the time remaining in a job allocation. The semantics defined here are inspired by experiences from the development and use of "Your One Get Remaining Time Library" libyogrt.

The following PMIx key is defined in pmix_common.h:


#define PMIX_TIME_REMAINING    "pmix.time.remaining"   // (uint32_t) get number of seconds remaining in allocation

This key can be used with the PMIx_Query interface to obtain the number of seconds remaining in the current job allocation. The following example illustrates usage of this key:


static uint32_t seconds_remaining;
static void cbfunc(pmix_status_t status, pmix_info_t *info, size_t ninfo,
void *cbdata, pmix_release_cbfunc_t release_fn, void release_cbdata)
{
volatile bool waiting = (volatile bool)cbdata;
/ read time_remaining */
seconds_remaining = info->value.data.uint32;
if (NULL != release_fn) {
    release_fn(release_cbdata);
}
*waiting = false;

}
int main(int argc, char *argv)
{
volatile bool waiting;
/ init us */
pmix_proc_t myproc;
if (PMIX_SUCCESS != (rc = PMIx_Init(&myproc))) {
fprintf(stderr, "Client ns %s rank %d: PMIx_Init failed: %d\n", myproc.nspace, myproc.rank, rc);
exit(0);
}
fprintf(stderr, "Client ns %s rank %d: Running\n", myproc.nspace, myproc.rank);
/* just query with one rank, we will bcast result to others /
if (myproc.rank == 0) {
/ query time remaining */
pmix_query_t *q;
size_t nq = 1;
PMIX_QUERY_CREATE(q, nq);
PMIX_ARGV_APPEND(q[0].keys, PMIX_TIME_REMAINING);
waiting = true;
PMIx_Query_info_nb(q, nq, cbfunc, (void*)&waiting);
while (waiting) {
  usleep(10);
}

/* seconds_remaining now has time left in allocation */

}
PMIx_Finalize(NULL, 0);
return 0;
}