Slurm Job Cancelled Due to Time Limit

Problem

A job finishes with a message saying slurmstepd error, with the job cancelled due to time limit. The error message will be in the Slurm output file. The slurmstepd error message may be preceded with a message from srun that the job step was aborted.

slurmstepd: error: *** JOB 3501970 ON nid00161 CANCELLED AT 2018-01-08T15:17:49 DUE TO TIME LIMIT ***

Solution

There are two likely causes. Firstly, the job may have reached the maximum time it was allowed to run. Secondly, if you have a fixed allocation then your allocation may have been used up.

1. Slurm allocates resources to a job for a fixed amount of time. This time limit is either specified in the job request, or if none is specified then it is the default limit. There are maximum limits on all Slurm partitions, so if you have not requested the maximum then try increasing the time limit in the request with the --time= flag to sbatch or sallo.

   #SBATCH --time=12:00:00

   To see the maximum and default time limits, use sinfo:

   Terminal 1. View the time limits for a queue

   $ sinfo -o "%.10P %.5a %.10l %.15L %.6D %.6t" -p workq
    PARTITION AVAIL  TIMELIMIT     DEFAULTTIME  NODES  STATE
       workq*    up 1-00:00:00         1:00:00      1  drain
       workq*    up 1-00:00:00         1:00:00     20   resv
       workq*    up 1-00:00:00         1:00:00     34    mix
       workq*    up 1-00:00:00         1:00:00     25  alloc

2. Usually if your allocation is not sufficient to support a job running to completion, Slurm will not start the job. However, if multiple jobs start at the same time then each job may not hit the limit but collectively they might. When this happens they will all start, but get terminated when the allocation is used up. You can tell this is the case if the elapsed time does not match the job's time limit.

   $ sacct -j 2954681 -o jobid,elapsed,time
          JobID    Elapsed  Timelimit
   ------------ ---------- ----------
   2954681        05:54:30 1-00:00:00
   2954681.bat+   05:54:31
   2954681.ext+   05:54:31
   2954681.0      05:54:30

   If this is the case, check whether your allocation is used up.  If it is, contact the Pawsey help desk.  See Job Scheduling for more information about project accounting.

   $ pawseyAccountBalance

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