Latest revision as of 16:50, 8 November 2022

Application Details

• Description: SLURM is an open-source job scheduler, used by HPCs.
• Version: 15.08.8

Introduction

The SLURM (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) workload manager is a free and open-source job scheduler for the Linux kernel. It is used by Viper and many of the world's supercomputers (and clusters).

• First, it allocates exclusive and/or non-exclusive access to resources (computer nodes) to users for some duration of time so they can perform work.
• Second, it provides a framework for starting, executing, and monitoring work (typically a parallel job such as MPI) on a set of allocated nodes.
• Thirdly, it arbitrates contention for resources by managing a queue of pending jobs.

Slurm takes your batch job submission and executes it across the computing nodes of Viper. How it is processed will depend on a number of factors including the queue it is submitted to, jobs already submitted to the queue etc.

• SLURM builder is available on viper.hull.ac.uk for ready-made custom scripts.

Common Slurm Commands

sbatch

Used to submit a job to Slurm.

[username@login01 ~]$ sbatch jobfile.job
Submitted batch job 289535

The number displayed (289535) is the Job ID

squeue

squeue shows information about jobs in the scheduling queue

[username@login01 ~]$ squeue
             JOBID  PARTITION     NAME   USER ST       TIME  NODES NODELIST(REASON)
             306414   compute  clasDFT   user  R      16:36      1 c006
             306413   compute mpi_benc   user  R      31:02      2 c[005,007]
             306411   compute  orca_1n   user  R    1:00:32      1 c004
             306410   compute  orca_1n   user  R    1:04:17      1 c003
             306409   highmem cnv_obit   user  R   11:37:17      1 c232
             306407   compute  20M4_20   user  R   11:45:54      1 c012
             306406   compute 20_ML_20   user  R   11:55:40      1 c012

scancel

scancel is used to cancel currently running jobs. Only jobs running under your userid may be cancelled.

[username@login01 ~]$ scancel 289535

No output is given by the command.

sinfo

sinfo shows the information on the partitions and nodes in the cluster.

[username@login01 ~]$ sinfo
PARTITION AVAIL  TIMELIMIT  NODES  STATE NODELIST
compute*     up 2-00:00:00      9    mix c[006,012,014,016,018-020,022,170]
compute*     up 2-00:00:00     11  alloc c[003-004,008,015,046,086,093,098,138,167-168]
compute*     up 2-00:00:00    156   idle c[001-002,005,007,009-011,013,017,021,023-045,047-085,087-092,094-097,099-137,139-166,169,171-176]
highmem      up 4-00:00:00      1    mix c230
highmem      up 4-00:00:00      2  alloc c[231-232]
highmem      up 4-00:00:00      1   idle c233
gpu          up 5-00:00:00      4   idle gpu[01-04]

Common Submission Flags

For ease and repetition, it is much easier to build Slurm commands into batch files, the following are an example of the most commonly used commands.

Note: The use of the --exclusive flag to indicate whether you require the whole node for your job if don't need a significant amount of processing cores then omitting this command will allow other users to use the unused resources of that node.

Example Job Submission Script

#!/bin/bash

#SBATCH -J Example_Slurm_Job
#SBATCH -N 1
#SBATCH -n 28
#SBATCH -o %N.%j.%a.out
#SBATCH -e %N.%j.%a.err
#SBATCH -p compute
#SBATCH --exclusive
#SBATCH --mail-user= your email address here 

echo $SLURM_JOB_NODELIST

module purge
module add gcc/8.2.0

export I_MPI_DEBUG=5
export I_MPI_FABRICS=shm:tmi
export I_MPI_FALLBACK=no

/home/user/slurmexample

See Also

For more information on creating batch jobs visit the Batch Jobs guide

Next Steps

• Slurm Website: https://slurm.schedmd.com/
• Slurm Rosetta (Useful for converting submission scripts from other formats)
• You might find applications' specific submission scripts here Application support

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