Recently I was trying to reconstruct a customer’s SGE job queue to understand why our cluster autoscaling wasn’t working quite right. The best way I found was to dump the output of qacct and grep for {qsub,start,end}_time. Several things made this unpleasant. First, the output is not de-duplicated on job id. Jobs that span multiple hosts get listed multiple times. Another thing is that the dates are in a nearly-but-not-quite “normal” format. For example: “Tue Mar 18 13:00:08 2014”.

What can you do with that? Not a whole lot. It’s not a format that spreadsheets will readily treat as a date, so if you want to do spreadsheety things, you’re forced to either manually enter them or write a shell function to do it for you:

function qacct2excel { echo "=`date -f '%a %b %d %T %Y' -j \"$1\"  +%s`/(60*60*24)+\"1/1/1970\"";

The above works on OS X because it uses a non-GNU date command. On Linux, you’ll need a different set of arguments, which I haven’t bothered to figure out. It’s still not awesome, but it’s slightly less tedious this way. At some point, I might write a parser that does what I want qacct to do, instead of what it does.

It’s entirely possible that there’s a better way to do this. The man page didn’t seem to have any helpful suggestions, though. I hate to say “SGE sucks” because I know very little about it. What I do know is that it’s hard to find good material for learning about SGE. At least HTCondor has thorough documentation and tutorials from HTCondor Week posted online. Perhaps one of these days I’ll learn more about SGE so I can determine whether it sucks or not.