An Autonomy Loop for Dynamic HPC Job Time Limit Adjustment

High Performance Computing (HPC) systems rely on fixed user-provided estimates of job time limits. These estimates are often inaccurate, resulting in inefficient resource use and the loss of unsaved work if a job times out shortly before reaching its next checkpoint. This work proposes a novel feedback-driven autonomy loop that dynamically adjusts HPC job time limits based on checkpoint progress reported by applications. Our approach monitors checkpoint intervals and queued jobs, enabling informed decisions to either early cancel a job after its last completed checkpoint or extend the time limit sufficiently to accommodate the next checkpoint. The objective is to minimize tail waste, that is, the computation that occurs between the last checkpoint and the termination of a job, which is not saved and hence wasted. Through experiments conducted on a subset of a production workload trace, we show a 95% reduction of tail waste, which equates to saving approximately 1.3% of the total CPU time that would otherwise be wasted. We propose various policies that combine early cancellation and time limit extension, achieving tail waste reduction while improving scheduling metrics such as weighted average job wait time. This work contributes an autonomy loop for improved scheduling in HPC environments, where system job schedulers and applications collaborate to significantly reduce resource waste and improve scheduling performance.