NEWS

This file describes changes in recent versions of SLURM. It primarily
documents those changes that are of interest to users and admins.

* Changes in SLURM 2.2.0.pre4
=============================
 -- Add support for a PropagatePrioProcess configuration parameter value of 2
    to restrict spawned task nice values to that of the slurmd daemon plus 1.
    This insures that the slurmd daemon always have a higher scheduling
    priority than spawned tasks.
 -- Fixed slurm_load_slurmd_status and slurm_pid2jobid to work correctly when
    multiple slurmds are in use.
 -- Altered srun to set max_nodes to min_nodes if not set when doing an
    allocation to mimic that which salloc and sbatch do.  If running a step if
    the max isn't set it remains unset.
 -- Applied patch from David Egolf (David.Egolf@Bull.com) Added the ability
    to purge/archive accounting data on a day or hour basis, previously
    it was only available on a monthly basis.
 -- Add support for maximum node count in job step request.
 -- Fix bug in CPU count logic for job step allocation (used count of CPUS per
    node rather than CPUs allocated to the job).
 -- Add new configuration parameters GroupUpdateForce and GroupUpdateTime.
    See "man slurm.conf" for details about how these control when slurmctld
    updates its information of which users are in the groups allowed to use
    partitions.

* Changes in SLURM 2.2.0.pre3
=============================
 -- Refine support for TotalView partial attach. Add parameter to configure
    program of "--enable-partial-attach".
 -- In select/cons_res, the count of CPUs on required nodes was formerly
    ignored in enforcing the maximum CPU limit. Also enforce maximum CPU
    limit when the topology/tree plugin is configured (previously ignored).
 -- In select/cons_res, allocate cores for a job using a best-fit approach.
 -- In select/cons_res, for jobs that can run on a single node, use a best-fit
    packing approach.
 -- Add support for new partition states of DRAIN and INACTIVE and new partition
    option of "Alternate" (alternate partition to use for jobs submitted to 
    partitions that are currently in a state of DRAIN or INACTIVE).
 -- Add group membership cache. This can substantially speed up slurmctld
    startup or reconfiguration if many partitions have AllowGroups configured.
 -- Added slurmdb api for accessing slurm DB information.
 -- In select/linear: Modify data structures for better performance and to 
    avoid underflow error messages when slurmctld restarts while jobs are
    in completing state.
 -- Added hash for slurm.conf so when nodes check in to the controller it can
    verify the slurm.conf is the same as the one it is running.  If not an
    error message is displayed.  To silence this message add NO_CONF_HASH
    to DebugFlags in your slurm.conf.
 -- Added error code ESLURM_CIRCULAR_DEPENDENCY and prevent circular job
    dependencies (e.g. job 12 dependent upon job 11 AND job 11 is dependent
    upon job 12).
 -- Add BootTime and SlurmdStartTime to available node information.
 -- Fixed moab_2_slurmdb to work correctly under new database schema.
 -- Slurmd will drain a compute node when the SlurmdSpoolDir is full.

* Changes in SLURM 2.2.0.pre2
=============================
 -- Add support for spank_get_item() to get S_STEP_ALLOC_CORES and 
    S_STEP_ALLOC_MEM. Support will remain for S_JOB_ALLOC_CORES and 
    S_JOB_ALLOC_MEM. 
 -- Kill individual job steps that exceed their memory limit rather than 
    killing an entire job if one step exceeds its memory limit.
 -- Added configuration parameter VSizeFactor to enforce virtual memory limits 
    for jobs and job steps as a percentage of their real memory allocation.
 -- Add scontrol ability to update job step's time limits.
 -- Add scontrol ability to update job's NumCPUs count.
 -- Add --time-min options to salloc, sbatch and srun. The scontrol command 
    has been modified to display and modify the new field. sched/backfill
    plugin has been changed to alter time limits of jobs with the 
    --time-min option if doing so permits earlier job initiation.
 -- Add support for TotalView symbol MPIR_partial_attach_ok with srun support
    to release processes which TotalView does not attach to.
 -- Add new option for SelectTypeParameters of CR_ONE_TASK_PER_CORE. This 
    option will allocate one task per core by default. Without this option, 
    by default one task will be allocated per thread on nodes with more than 
    one ThreadsPerCore configured.
 -- Avoid accounting separately for a current pid corresponds to a Light Weight
    Process (Thread POSIX) appearing in the /proc directory. Only account for
    the original process (pid==tgid) to avoid accounting for memory use more 
    than once.
 -- Add proctrack/cgroup plugin which uses Linux control groups (aka cgroup)
    to track processes on Linux systems having this feature enabled (kernel
    >= 2.6.24).
 -- Add logging of license transations including job_id.
 -- Add configuration parameters SlurmSchedLogFile and SlurmSchedLogLevel to
    support writing scheduling events to a separate log file.
 -- Added contribs/web_apps/chart_stats.cgi, a web app that invokes sreport to
    retrieve from the accounting storage db a user's request for job usage or
    machine utilization statistics and charts the results to a browser.
 -- Massive change to the schema in the storage_accounting/mysql plugin.  When
    starting the slurmdbd the process of conversion may take a few minutes.
    You might also see some errors such as 'error: mysql_query failed: 1206
    The total number of locks exceeds the lock table size'.  If you get this,
    do not worry, it is because your setting of innodb_buffer_pool_size in
    your my.cnf file is not set or set too low.  A decent value there should
    be 64M or higher depending on the system you are running on.  See
    RELEASE_NOTES for more information.  But setting this and then
    restarting the mysqld and slurmdbd will put things right.  After this
    change we have noticed 50-75% increase in performance with sreport and
    sacct.
 -- Fix for MaxCPUs to honor partitions of 1 node that have more than the
    maxcpus for a job.
 -- Add support for "scontrol notify <message>" to work for batch jobs.

* Changes in SLURM 2.2.0.pre1
=============================
 -- Added RunTime field to scontrol show job report
 -- Added SLURM_VERSION_NUMBER and removed SLURM_API_VERSION from 
    slurm/slurm.h.
 -- Added support to handle communication with SLURM 2.1 clusters.  Job's
    should not be lost in the future when upgrading to higher versions of 
    SLURM.
 -- Added withdeleted options for listing clusters, users, and accounts
 -- Remove PLPA task affinity functions due to that package being deprecated.
 -- Preserve current partition state information and node Feature and Weight 
    information rather than use contents of slurm.conf file after slurmctld 
    restart with -R option or SIGHUP. Replace information with contents of 
    slurm.conf after slurmctld restart without -R or "scontrol reconfigure".
    See RELEASE_NOTES file fore more details.
 -- Modify SLURM's PMI library (for MPICH2) to properly execute an executable
    program stand-alone (single MPI task launched without srun).
 -- Made GrpCPUs and MaxCPUs limits work for select/cons_res.
 -- Moved all SQL dependant plugins into a seperate rpm slurm-sql.  This
    should be needed only where a connection to a database is needed (i.e.
    where the slurmdbd is running)
 -- Add command line option "no_sys_info" to PAM module to supress system 
    logging of "access granted for user ...", access denied and other errors
    will still be logged.
 -- sinfo -R now has the user and timestamp in separate fields from the reason.
 -- Much functionality has been added to account_storage/pgsql.  The plugin
    is still in a very beta state.  It is still highly advised to use the
    mysql plugin, but if you feel like living on the edge or just really
    like postgres over mysql for some reason here you go. (Work done
    primarily by Hongjia Cao, NUDT.)

* Changes in SLURM 2.1.6
========================
 -- For newly submitted jobs, report expected start time in squeue --start as
    "N/A" rather than current time.
 -- Correct sched/backfill logic so that it runs in a more timely fashion.
 -- Fixed issue if running on accounting cache and priority/multifactor to
    initialize the root association when the database comes back up.
 -- Emulated BLUEGENE - fixed issue where blocks weren't always created
    correctly when loading from state.  This does not apply to a real
    bluegene system, only emulated.
 -- Fixed bug when job is completing where you could get cpu_cnt underflow on
    completing jobs.

* Changes in SLURM 2.1.5
========================
 -- BLUEGENE - Fixed display of draining nodes for sinfo -R.
 -- Fixes to scontrol and sview when setting a job to an impossible start time.
 -- Added -h to srun for help.
 -- Fix for sacctmgr man page to remove erroneous 'with' statements.
 -- Fix for unpacking jobs with accounting statistics, previously it appears
    only steps were unpacked correctly, for the most case sacct would only
    display this information making this fix a very minor one.
 -- Changed scontrol and sview output for jobs with unknown end times from
    'NONE' to 'Unknown'.
 -- Fixed mysql plugin to reset classification when adding a
    previously deleted cluster.
 -- Permit a batch script to reset umask and have that propagate to tasks
    spawed by subsequent srun. Previously the umask in effect when sbatch was
    executed was propagated to tasks spawed by srun.
 -- Modify slurm_job_cpus_allocated_on_node_id() and 
    slurm_job_cpus_allocated_on_node() functions to not write explanation of 
    failures to stderr. Only return -1 and set errno.
 -- Correction in configurator.html script. Prolog and Epilog were reversed.
 -- BLUEGENE - Fixed race condition where if a nodecard has an error on an
    un-booted block when a job comes to use it before the state checking
    thread notices it which could cause the slurmctld to lock up on a
    non-dynamic system.
 -- In select/cons_res with FastSchedule=0 and Procs=# defined for the node, 
    but no specific socket/core/thread count configured, avoid fatal error if 
    the number of cores on a node is less than the number of Procs configured.
 -- Added ability for the perlapi to utilize opaque data types returned from
    the C api.
 -- BLUEGENE - made the perlapi get correct values for cpus per node,
    Previously it would give the number of cpus per cnode instead of midplane.
 -- BLEUGENE - Fixed issue where if a block being selected for a job to use
    and during the process a hardware failure happens, previously the block
    would still be allowed to be used which would fail or requeue the job
    depending on the configuration.
 -- For SPANK job environment, avoid duplicate "SPANK_" prefix for environment
    set by sbatch jobs.
 -- Make squeue select jobs on hidden partitions when requesting more than one.
 -- Avoid automatically cancelling job steps when all of the tasks on some node
    have gracefully terminated.

* Changes in SLURM 2.1.4
========================
 -- Fix for purge script in accounting to use correct options.
 -- If SelectType=select/linear and SelectTypeParameters=CR_Memory fix bug that
    would fail to release memory reserved for a job if "scontrol reconfigure" 
    is executed while the job is in completing state.
 -- Fix bug in handling event trigger for job time limit while job is still 
    in pending state.
 -- Fixed display of Ave/MaxCPU in sacct for jobs. Steps were printed
    correctly.
 -- When node current features differs from slurm.conf, log the node names