fqstat

An interactive console based front-end for Sun's Grid Engine

Sun Microsystems released their Grid Engine (SGE) (Wikipedia) batch-queueing system as open source in 2001. We have been using SGE extensively for managing our cluster and fqstat is the console-based interactive front-end I developed for SGE. Following Sun's example, I'll make it available as free software. It was tested against SGE version 6.0.

fqstat can be used to track the state of jobs in the queue as well as to modify their state. Its user interface was somewhat modeled after the well-known top utility. It is console based so it can be used via ssh over slow, remote network connections. It was developed because using the SGE's builtin 'qstat' command can be very tedious when the queue contains 100000 jobs. fqstat boasts the following benefits over 'qstat':

• Interactivity and user interface: No tedious remembering of command line options, no more running "qstat | less" on a big queue and then waiting minutes for your dialup to catch up with the data stream. Instead, you can navigate the list of jobs using
• Easy to use, easy to learn. fqstat has a very simple online help.
• fqstat conveniently, non-blockingly refreshes the displayed information in the background, using a separate thread.
• Coloured status display for bettwe overview.
• Highlighting of jobs based on user name.
• Sortable by arbitrary columns. (Status, user, job name or id, queue name, ...)
• Killing jobs.
• Mofifying the priority of jobs.
• Holding and resuming jobs.
• Clearing the error state of jobs.
• Changing the inter-job dependencies.
• Automatically adapts the amount of information displayed to the size of the console.

fqstat is not a full replacement for the default set of SGE command line tools. For example, it is not meant for submitting new jobs.

Examples

This is what an example session looks like. (Jobs filtered to display only my jobs.)

This is another example, with jobs of user haag highlighted.

Selecting jobs to be killed.

Resources

There is currently no manual page for the program, but users have found it easy to use even without one.

• Perl 5.8 or newer. Mostly tested on 5.8.8. Presumably, 5.10.x is even better.
• The newest version of the threads module from CPAN. fqstat works with older versions, but the older, the more likely there will be a memory leak.
• Likewise, there should be a recent version of the threads::shared module for the same reason.
• The Term::ANSIScreen module from CPAN.
• The SGE's qstat, qalter, qmod executables should be available in your $PATH.
• Tested against SGE 6.0. Your mileage with other versions may vary. Please let me know if there are incompatibilities.

Since the requirement of a recent "threads" version might be a problem for users inexperienced with respect to installing Perl modules, I packaged a binary of fqstat on a x86-32-bit Linux. It runs on various 32 and 64bit Linuxes of varying age. It was generated using PAR. We're using it extensively at work, but downloading binary executables from the net is something you do at your own risk.

The complete source download: fqstat-current.tar.gz (version 4.6)
The 32-bit Linux binary: fqstat-4.5-binary.tar.gz (version 4.5) The 32-bit Linux binary: fqstat-4.0-binary.tar.gz (version 4.0)

Please send your suggestions, inquiries, and feedback to fqstat at steffen-mueller dot net.

Copyright (C) 2007 Steffen Mueller This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

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