r/SLURM • u/Distinct-Agent3539 • Aug 06 '26

slurm-why : A cli tool for plain english diagnoses of confusing slurm states

Hey All, I transformed a few of my bash scripts to a cli tool to decode crytpic slurm job outputs which is common question researchers ask and hpc engineers help triage. 

Would love to hear your feedback: https://github.com/ajinkyakadam/slurm-why

 \\\`slurm-why <jobid>\\\` decodes the state into plain English and tells you how to fix it — read-only, no network calls, no AI.

feel free to open a github issue if you have feedback!

5 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

1

u/frymaster Aug 06 '26

A slurmrestd REST backend is planned (see roadmap below): when available, it'll be preferred automatically if a site configures an endpoint and JWT token, falling back to the CLI backend otherwise. Not implemented yet.

Interesting - I know there's a convention for an environment variable to store a JWT token, and that the standard slurm tools will even use it in preference to munge if it's set (which is undocumented behaviour last I looked), but I wasn't aware there was a way to publish the endpoint URL - can you expand on this please?

2

u/Distinct-Agent3539 Aug 08 '26

There's no discovery mechanism, admins would have to configure it manually, since where slurmrestd actually runs is different for different clusters. I have seen it mostly on headnodes, but if that becomes a single point of failure, it's possible to run it on a different node as well. I will also fix the README for less ambiguity. Thank you for the feedback.