Running Jobs¶

Slurm¶

FarmShare uses Slurm for job (resource) management. Full documentation and detailed usage information is provided in the man pages for the srun, sbatch, squeue, scancel, sinfo, and scontrol commands.

Jobs are scheduled according to a priority which depends on a number of factors, including how long a job has been waiting, its size, and a fair-share value that tracks recent per-user utilization of cluster resources. Lower-priority jobs, and jobs requiring access to resources not currently available, may wait some time before starting to run. The scheduler may reserve resources so that pending jobs can start; while it will try to backfill these resources with smaller, shorter jobs (even those at lower priorities), this behavior can sometimes cause nodes to appear to be idle even when there are jobs that are ready to run. You can use squeue --start to get an estimate of when pending jobs will start.

Interactive Jobs¶

Interactive sessions that require resources in excess of limits on the login nodes, exclusive access to resources, or access to a feature not available on the login nodes (e.g., a GPU), can be submitted to a compute node. Each user is allowed one interactive job, which may run for at most one day. You can use the srun command to request one:

ta5@rice-04:~$ srun --qos=interactive --pty bash
ta5@wheat-01:~$ 

Batch Jobs¶

The sbatch command is used to submit a batch job, and takes a batch script as an argument. Options are used to request specific resources (including runtime), and can be provided either on the command line or, using a special syntax, in the script file itself. sbatch can also be used to submit many similar jobs, each perhaps varying in only one or two parameters, in a single invocation using the –array option; each job in an array has access to environment variables identifying its rank.

Sample batch script to submit a job:

ta5@rice-04:~$ cat hello_world.sh 
#!/bin/bash

#SBATCH --job-name=hello_world
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --partition=normal

echo 'Hello World!'
ta5@rice-04:~$ 
ta5@rice-04:~$ 
ta5@rice-04:~$ sbatch hello_world.sh 
Submitted batch job 177987
ta5@rice-04:~$ 
ta5@rice-04:~$ cat slurm-177987.out 
Hello World!
ta5@rice-04:~$ 

Partition Info¶

Partition	Max Mem	Max CPU
normal	188GB	256
bigmem	768GB	344
interactive	188GB	16