In the sacct command in the Slurm workload manager, is there a way to find the maximum of the "Elapsed" column or sort it?

Question

Currently, I am running a job array of 1000 using Slurm. When it is done, I use sacct to see how much time was actually taken. I would like to see what was the longest running job. It would be the largest value under the "Elapsed" column. Is there a way to sort it?

sacct -o reqmem,maxrss,averss,elapsed  -j 44523498
    ReqMem     MaxRSS     AveRSS    Elapsed
---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
     800Mn                         02:24:15
     800Mn    655756K    655756K   02:24:15
     800Mn       844K       344K   02:24:17
     800Mn                         02:10:08
     800Mn    631912K    631912K   02:10:08
     800Mn      1032K       344K   02:10:08
     800Mn                         01:38:14
     800Mn    635304K    635304K   01:38:14
     800Mn       848K       348K   01:38:14
     800Mn                         02:28:04

This is what I have below. Thanks!

Answer 1

The easiest way would be to display the elapsed as the first column and use the sort command. sort sorts alphanumerically, which will work with the Slurm time formatting thanks to the 2-digit padding.

sacct -o elapsed,reqmem,maxrss,averss  -j 44523498 | sort

You can additionally use the -n flag to avoid the header lines, if you do not want them to clutter the output.

Note that sort can be told to sort on a specific column, with the -k flag but here the number of column is different for job steps and job summary. You can remove the job step information (which is redundant w.r.t elapsed) with -X.