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How to match only Multicore jobs in recently drained slots

Known to work with HTCondor version: 8.2.8

Since the purpose of the defrag daemon is to drain jobs on a p-slot so multi-core jobs can begin to match, it would be best to implement a policy where recently drained p-slots can insist on matching only multicore jobs for a period of time.

Unfortunately, there is no attribute that uniquely identifies a recently drained slot - but there are two candidate attributes that come close with some caveats.

We can use one of these two attributes to trigger a policy that will match only multi-core jobs for N negotiation cycles on "recently drained" slots:

This is the preferred policy - use this policy if you use the defrag daemon

 # This knob must be set in the negotiator's configuration. It prevents
 # slots from going into matched state, which works fine and is necessary
 # to make the $(StateTimer) trigger only when we leave draining state.
NEGOTIATOR_INFORM_STARTD = false

 # Set OnlyMulticoreInterval to the number of seconds the startd should
 # only allow multi-core jobs. Default to about 2 negotiation cycles.
OnlyMulticoreInterval = 2*$(NEGOTIATOR_INTERVAL:300)
 # If this slot has more than 4 cores free, then insist on jobs that
 # request at least 4 core or more.
IsMulticore = RequestCpus >= IfThenElse(Cpus<4,1,4)
 # This is already defined in the default config, included for here for clarity
StateTimer = (time() - EnteredCurrentState)
 # We only want this policy to apply to partitionable slots (pslots)
IsntUnmatchedPSlot = PartitionableSlot=!=true || State=="Matched"

OnlyMulticoreJobsAfterDrain = $(IsntUnmatchedPSlot) || $(IsMulticore) || $(StateTimer) > $(OnlyMulticoreInterval)

START = $(START) && ( $(OnlyMulticoreJobsAfterDrain) )

The policy says that for 2 negotiation cycles after the STARTD starts up or leaves draining state, the slot should only match jobs that want at least 4 cores. Once the slot has less than 4 available Cpus remaining, it will match single-core jobs. We only want this portion of the START expression to be evaluated by the Negotiator, which is what the $(IsntUnmatchedPSlot) sub-expression does.

Alternate policy that triggers whenever the p-slot fully drains for any reason - but doesn't work at all if draining is only partial

This policy using ExpectedMachineGracefulDrainingCompletion triggers the preference for multi-core automatically whenever a p-slot has no child d-slots, but, it reverts back to matching any job as soon as there are child d-slots.

 # A job counts as multicore when it requests 4 or more core, or when
 # it has already matched to a slot that has less than 4 cores.
IsMulticore = RequestCpus >= IfThenElse(Cpus<4,1,4)
 # We want to insist on multicore jobs for about 2 negotiation cycles
OnlyMulticoreInterval = $(NEGOTIATOR_INTERVAL:60)*2
 # How long has it been since the p-slot was fully drained.
 # note that if the result is < 0, draining is in the future.
DrainStateTimer = (time() - ExpectedMachineGracefulDrainingCompletion)

OnlyMulticoreJobsAfterDrain = PartitionableSlot=!=true || $(IsMulticore) || $(DrainStateTimer) > $(OnlyMulticoreInterval) || $(DrainStateTimer) < 0

START = $(START) && ( $(OnlyMulticoreJobsAfterDrain) )