Assigning Job Attributes for Accounting and Tracking

In this article, you will learn how to assign unique attributes to a job that can later be used for accounting purposes.  Also see “myusage” and “clui”

Certain optional unique Job Attributes can be specified to the job. They are intended to be used for accounting and job tracking by the user. Later, this information can be used to generate reports using “myusage” and the clui tool.

The special Job Attributes are:

  • JobSet – can be any alpha-numeric text (no spaces)
  • Customer – can be any alpha-numeric text (no spaces)
  • Application – can be any alpha-numeric text (no spaces)
  • Project – can be any alpha-numeric text (no spaces)
  • Label – can be any alpha-numeric text (no spaces)
  • Tag – can be any alpha-numeric text (no spaces)
  • Category – can be any alpha-numeric text (no spaces)
  • Status – can be any alpha-numeric text (no spaces)
  • Score  – can be any alpha-numeric text (no spaces)
  • Flagged – only numeric

     0|1

Special Job Attributes are specified in the .pbs file using  the #PBS -A ATTRIBUTE=VALUE  and VALUE is any alpha-numeric string. For example:

#PBS -A Customer=ABC:Project=abc1:JobSet=xyz

or

#PBS -A Customer=ABC
#PBS -A Project=abc1
#PBS -A JobSet=xyz

In this example.pbs file below, the user is defining the Customer, Project, and JobSet attributes to the job:

#PBS -l nodes=2:ppn=8:green
#PBS -l nodes+=1:ppn=24:copper
#PBS -l nodes++=2:ppn=8:cobalt

#PBS -A Customer=AcmeAAA:Project=lowerlevel:JobSet=43b21

# add the latest version of FDS module to your environment
module add fds
# change to the working directory
cd $PBS_O_WORKDIR
# run in parallel on 16 cores
mpirun fds_mpi fire_whirl_pool.fds

Special Job Attributes may be specified with the -A option to qsub command. Each attribute must be seperated by a colon (:). If multiple -A options are specified, the last value is used. For example:

qsub -A Customer=ABC:JobSet=123:Application=a.out:Project=XYZ  myfile.pbs

Generate a Report

The “mysuage” command  can later be used to generate a usage report containing the special job attributes. First run “mybalance” to get the allocation ID. Then use it to generate the report. For example:

myusage --allocation [id] --display _default,attributes --csv -E name@youremail.com

will generate a csv report all jobs charged to a particular allocation and email it to the email address. The CVS file can then be imported into a spread sheet such as MS Excel.

Tagged: