vmem and maxvmem

Question

I have a question about vmem and maxvmem. I searched on the web but there are really many confusing explanations of the two words. What I did was to type:

qstat -j 1154926 | grep vmem

The output was: cpu=00:05:25, mem=23.21121 GBs, io=2.70481, vmem=239.277M, maxvmem=351.359M

Can anyone help me to understand the meaning of the variables?

Best

Answer 1

I found this link to be helpful.

qstat

qstat can provide more detailed information about a running job by passing it a job id specified by the '-j' argument:

[jamesa@codon sge_test]$ qstat -j 3804867
==============================================================
job_number:                 3804867
exec_file:                  job_scripts/3804867
submission_time:            Wed Jun 29 11:04:02 2011
owner:                      jamesa
uid:                        1001
group:                      bss-staff
gid:                        50001
sge_o_home:                 /home/jamesa
sge_o_log_name:             jamesa
sge_o_path:                 /usr/lib64/openmpi/bin:/usr/lib64/openmpi/1.4-gcc/bin:/opt/sge/6_2u5_1/bin/lx26-amd64:/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/lib/jvm/java/bin:/usr/lib/jvm/jre/bin:/usr/biosoft/bin:/usr/biosoft/perl_modules/bioperl/current/bin:/usr/biosoft/packages/emboss/current/bin:/home/jamesa/bin
sge_o_shell:                /bin/bash
sge_o_workdir:              /home/jamesa/sge_test
sge_o_host:                 codon
account:                    sge
cwd:                        /home/jamesa/
sge_testmerge:                      y
hard resource_list:         h_rt=3600,h_vmem=2G
mail_list:                  jamesa@codon.bioinformatics.ic.ac.uk
notify:                     FALSE
job_name:                   blast
jobshare:                   0
env_list:                  
script_file:                blast.sh
usage    1:                 cpu=00:01:37, mem=78.06343 GBs, io=0.00002, vmem=925.562M, maxvmem=1.012G
scheduling info:            There are no messages available

You can see the resources you requested at submission time on the 'hard_resource_list' line of the qstat output. The actual resources used by the job at the time qstat were executed are shown in the 'usage' line.
Email Reporting

A summary of the jobs resource usage can be obtained by requesting an email report following the jobs completion, using the '-m e' qsub directive (see advanced submission options for details). An example email report is show below.

Job 3804869 (blast) Complete
  User             = jamesa
  Queue            = 3day_16@bss-node11.cluster.bioinformatics.ic.ac.uk
  Host             = bss-node11.cluster.bioinformatics.ic.ac.uk
  Start Time       = 06/29/2011 11:26:08
  End Time         = 06/29/2011 11:30:43
  User Time        = 00:03:51
  System Time       = 00:00:12
  Wallclock Time   = 00:04:35
  CPU              = 00:04:04
  Max vmem         = 1.012G
  Exit Status      = 0

The total memory used is indicated by the 'Max vmem' field, while the total runtime is reported as 'Wallclock Time'. Care should be taken when submitting a large number of jobs with email reporting enabled, since you may find yourself recieving several thousand reports in individual emails.

Answer 2

The vmem variable states the current available virtual memory on that node/queue combination. The maxvmem states what the node/queue combination can present as the maximum available virtual memory.