[Mauiusers] job submitted to multiple nodes is blocked

[Robert Jacobi]

Hello,

We're running Maui with Torque on our cluster (10 nodes, 8 cores each). 
When I submit a job on multiple nodes specifying them in a certain why 
my job gets blocked by Maui, otherwise it runs just fine.

Here's the line I usually use in submission script to submit jobs to 
mutliple nodes (say if I need 16 cores): "#PBS -l nodes=2:ppn=8". That 
works just fine.

But when I don't need a multiple of 8 processors and don't want to block 
processors unnecessarily, I tried the following (say to get 20 cores): 
"#PBS -l nodes=2:ppn=8+1:ppn=4"
According to the Torque user manual that should get me 16 cores on 2 
nodes and 4 cores on the third. I can submit it without a problem, but 
then it is blocked by Maui.
For testing I also tried "#PBS -l nodes=1:ppn=1+1:ppn=1" and "#PBS -l 
nodes=1:ppn=8+1:ppn=8", which are blocked as well

Output from showq for the blocked job:
================================================================
BLOCKED JOBS----------------
JOBNAME            USERNAME      STATE  PROC     WCLIMIT            
QUEUETIME
1272                 robert  BatchHold     1    00:00:30  Tue Mar 29 
18:06:47
================================================================

The relevant policies (as far as I know), which are set in maui.cfg, are:
NODEACCESSPOLICY        SHARED
JOBNODEMATCHPOLICY      EXACTNODE

Please, can anybody point me to where the problem might be? If there are 
queue specific settings that could cause this, I'd be more than happy to 
provide more information.

Thanks,
Robert

PS: I am aware that I could just reserve multiple of 8 processors and 
let some of them sit idle, but on our relatively small cluster that 
amounts to s significant waste of resources.

-- 
Robert Jacobi
Research Assistant
University of Arizona
Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering
1130 N. Mountain Ave.
Tucson, AZ, 85721-0119

tel: +1 (520) 621 4369
mail: rjacobi at email.arizona.edu


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