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It is quite painful to discover that a few-day long job is going to be prematurely killed due to an error in setting walltime limit for it.

Is there a way to change it for a running PBS job?

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3 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

This is system-specific, but you are looking for the qalter command.

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And usually, if you don't have managing privilege on that system, you will only be able to lower resources, which is probably not what you want... – FrenchKheldar Nov 30 '11 at 20:17
@FrenchKheldar I got the impression that giving this privilege to users is fairly common. It can be of course used to abuse the queue, yet it is trivial to track such behavior. – mbq Dec 1 '11 at 0:17
@mbq I guess my experience is with government machines where I guess there could be more restrictions than in other environments. And as a user always looking for access to computational resources, I would definitely look into this kind of loophole if this was allowed. This means you could circumvent the priority queue by asking for fewer resources... – FrenchKheldar Dec 1 '11 at 0:24
Interesting, I always thought qalter could only increase time limits before the job starts (which I believe I read in the man page). – David Zaslavsky Dec 1 '11 at 2:19
up vote 2 down vote

Contact the IT administrators over your cluster. I know of people that have had other problems, such as jobs that won't start. Once our IT admin's found out, they took care of it.

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up vote 1 down vote

For lazy people:

qalter -l walltime=<new walltime> <jobid>
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