Account vs. project about psij-python

[hategan]

One note, when setting -P on improv, qsub fails with "The project cannot be set by qsub". The PBS documentation (https://2021.help.altair.com/2021.1/PBSProfessional/PBSReferenceGuide2021.1.pdf) is not entirely clear (to me at least) on which is which and what the purpose of -P is, but it does mildly suggest that -A is what should be used for accounting purposes.

[andre-merzky]

Follow-up from the call: I was a bit off with my pbs statement: SAGA did this:

        if 'PBSPro_1' in pbs_version:
            # On PBS Pro we set both -P(roject) and -A(accounting),
            # as we don't know what the admins decided, and just
            # pray that this doesn't create problems.
            pbs_params += "#PBS -P %s \n" % str(jd.project)
            pbs_params += "#PBS -A %s \n" % str(jd.project)
        else:
            # Torque
            pbs_params += "#PBS -A %s \n" % str(jd.project)

Apparently this would not have worked on improv 😛

The parsing of project was something we had on slurm where we used it to specify a 'reservation':

        if project and ':' in project:
            account, reservation = project.split(':', 1)
        else:
            account, reservation = project, None
[...]

        if account     : script += '#SBATCH --account "%s"\n'     % account
        if reservation : script += '#SBATCH --reservation "%s"\n' % reservation

Either way though: what you propose (rename to 'account' ) seems reasonable - this is used for accounting after all. Being able to set 'project' with something like jobspec.account = 'my_account:my_project' for machines where this is needed sounds still reasonable to me. But if one machine only needs 'project', then that would end up as jobspec.account = ':my_project' which is ok if it happens rarely, but not so ok if that happens very frequently I guess.