Beartooth's "non-investor" partition

Beartooth has a special partition called “non-investor” that functions a little differently than other partitions. Rather than being based on a specific hardware set or level of investment, the non-investor partition lumps all community nodes into one partition.

A user job can request a particular partition by specifying the name of a partition in its job sbatch submission script with #SBATCH --partition=<partition_name> option. In this case: #SBATCH --partition=non-investor.

Pros:

  • Jobs cannot be preempted by investors.

Cons:

  • Some node types may not be available. There are some nodes that are present in Beartooth only because a researcher purchased them and generously allowed others to use those nodes when they are not.

  • The total number of available nodes (currently 282) is greatly reduced compared to the cluster as a whole. This can greatly increase a job’s queue time, depending on current demand.