--- title: "Re-submission and debugging" author: "George G. Vega Yon" date: "`r Sys.Date()` (Last revision Feb 13, 2020)" output: rmarkdown::html_vignette vignette: > %\VignetteIndexEntry{Job-resubmission} %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown} %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8} --- # Introduction Want it or not, a lot of times jobs fail. In such cases, it could be hard to figure out what went wrong. The `slurmR` package has some tools that can help you deal with this. The documentation that follows applies for job submitted with sbatch, this is, job that were submitted using either `Slurm_lapply`, `Slurm_sapply`, `Slurm_Map`, or `Slurm_EvalQ`. # Checking logs When calling any of the `*apply` family functions, `slurmR` creates a folder with the name equal to `job_name` in `tmp_path` as follows: ```{r getting-names, echo=FALSE} file_names <- list( r = slurmR::snames("r", tmp_path = "[tmp_path]", job_name = "[job-name]"), sh = slurmR::snames("sh", tmp_path = "[tmp_path]", job_name = "[job-name]"), out = slurmR::snames("out", tmp_path = "[tmp_path]", job_name = "[job-name]"), rds = slurmR::snames("rds", tmp_path = "[tmp_path]", job_name = "[job-name]") ) file_names <- lapply( file_names, gsub, pattern = ".+/(?=[0-9])", replacement = "", perl = TRUE ) file_names <- lapply(file_names, function(f) paste0("`", f, "`")) ``` - `r file_names$r`: The R script that is used to load the data, and execute whatever the instruction is (`sapply`, `lapply`, `Map`, etc.). - `r file_names$sh`: The Slurm configuration bash file. This passes all the SBATCH options the user specified and calls `Rscript` to submit the job. - `r file_names$out`: The name-pattern for the log files generated by Rscript. In the case of job-arrays, the pattern `%A` is the jobid and `%a` is the Array id. This is usually the place where to look for useful information on why the script failed. - `r file_names$rds`: The name pattern of the output `rds` files. Usually, the jobs end-up writing an output, e.g. the results from the `lapply` call, and the `%i` in the pattern indicates the array id. - `*.rds` Further R objects that were exported for this particular job. In the case of `Slurm_lapply`, for example, it usually includes `X1.rds`, `X2.rds`, ..., `X[njobs].rds` files. Other R objects needed for the call will be saved in this same folder as well. If there's an issue with the submitted job, the user can take a look at these files. In general, looking at the log files is enough to figure out what could be going on. Let's see the following example: 1. We are submitting a job that runs a complicated algorithm ```r library(slurmR) x <- Slurm_lapply( 1:1000, function(x) complicated_algorithm(x), njobs = 4, plan = "submit" ) ``` By printing the output, you may see something like this: ```r x Call: Slurm_lapply(X = 1:1000, FUN = function(x) complicated_algorithm(x), njobs = 4, plan = "submit") job_name : slurmr-job-5724cb1616 tmp_path : /auto/rcf-40/vegayon/slurmR/slurmr-job-5724cb1616 job ID : 6163924 Status: All jobs are pending resource allocation or are on it's way to start. (Code 1) This is a job array. The status of each job, by array id, is the following: done : - failed : - pending : - running : 1, 2, 3, 4. ``` The problem is, what happens if one of these fails, for example, 1 and 3: ```r x Call: Slurm_lapply(X = 1:1000, FUN = function(x) complicated_algorithm(x), njobs = 4, plan = "submit") job_name : slurmr-job-5724cb1616 tmp_path : /auto/rcf-40/vegayon/slurmR/slurmr-job-5724cb1616 job ID : 6163924 Status: One or more jobs failed. (Code 99) This is a job array. The status of each job, by array id, is the following: done : 2, 4. failed : 1, 3. pending : - running : - ``` We can check the log-files of the failed jobs using `Slurm_log`, for example, if we wanted to checkout the log-file of the first job of the array, we can type: ```r Slurm_log(x, which. = 1) ``` By default, while in interactive mode, you will get a prompt telling you that `less` (the default) will be called using the `system2` command, and asking you if you wish to continue. You can change the way to checkout the log file by using an alternative command, like `cat`, e.g.: ```r Slurm_log(x, which. = 1, cmd = "cat") ``` Again, while in interactive mode, you will get a prompt asking you to enter `"y"` or `"n"`. If the command fails, it is usually due to a missing log, either you entered an invalid number in `which.`, or the job-array didn't started the log-file. If the error has to do with the later, then you can always inspect the files located in the job folder using command line tools: ```bash $ cd /path-to-the-temp-dir/path-to-the-job-name/ ``` # Job-resubmission Following the previous case, let's imagine that the failure was due to some unexpected error (the node failed), so we can resubmit the job, in order to do such, we can use the function `sbatch` like it follows: ```r # Recall that x is a slurm_job object sbatch(x, array = "1,3") ``` This will re-submit the job, but only the components 1 and 3. Once it is done, the user can collect the results using `Slurm_collect`. This will read in the results of all jobs, not just 1 and 3. If for some reason the R session was closed before been able to save the `slurm_job` object, users can always recover the `slurm_job` object by using the `read_slurm_job` function, e.g.: ```r # Starting from a fresh session library(slurmR) # By typing the path to the job folder, slurmR will recover the job x <- read_slurm_job("/path-to-the-temp-dir/path-to-the-job-name/") ```