Problem
Jobs typically pass through several states in the course of their execution and you might want to have an explanation of these states.
Solution
You can find an explanation of Slurm JOB STATE CODES (one letter or extended) in the manual page of the squeue command, accessible with man squeue.
The typical states are PD (PENDING), R (RUNNING), S (SUSPENDED), CG (COMPLETING), and CD (COMPLETED). The meaning of the states is summarized below:
BF BOOT_FAIL Job terminated due to launch failure, typically due to a hardware failure (e.g. unable to boot the node or block and the job can not be requeued)
CA CANCELLED Job was explicitly cancelled by the user or system administrator. The job may or may not have been initiated
CD COMPLETED Job has terminated all processes on all nodes with an exit code of zero
CF CONFIGURING Job has been allocated resources, but are waiting for them to become ready for use (e.g. booting)
CG COMPLETING Job is in the process of completing. Some processes on some nodes may still be active
DL DEADLINE Job terminated on deadline
F FAILED Job terminated with non-zero exit code or other failure condition
NF NODE_FAIL Job terminated due to failure of one or more allocated nodes
OOM OUT_OF_MEMORY Job experienced out of memory error
PD PENDING Job is awaiting resource allocation
PR PREEMPTED Job terminated due to preemption
R RUNNING Job currently has an allocation
RD RESV_DEL_HOLD Job is held
RF REQUEUE_FED Job is being requeued by a federation
RH REQUEUE_HOLD Held job is being requeued
RQ REQUEUED Completing job is being requeued
RS RESIZING Job is about to change size
RV REVOKED Sibling was removed from cluster due to other cluster starting the job
SI SIGNALING Job is being signaled
SE SPECIAL_EXIT The job was requeued in a special state. This state can be set by users, typically in EpilogSlurmctld, if the job has terminated with a particular exit value
SO STAGE_OUT Job is staging out files
ST STOPPED Job has an allocation, but execution has been stopped with SIGSTOP signal. CPUS have been retained by this job
S SUSPENDED Job has an allocation, but execution has been suspended and CPUs have been released for other jobs
TO TIMEOUTJob terminated upon reaching its time limit