What is Slurm

Owned by Simon Alexander, created
Last updated: Aug 27, 2024
12 min read

Goal: Introduction to Slurm and how to start interactive sessions, submit jobs and monitor.

Workload Managers 

  1. Allocates access to appropriate computer nodes specific to your requests.

  2. Framework for starting, executing, monitoring, and even canceling your jobs.

  3. Queue management and job state notification.

ARCC
NWSC

ARCC: Slurm: Wiki Pages 

Slurm Related Commands

Interactive Session: salloc

  • You’re there doing the work.

  • Suitable for developing and testing over a few hours.

[]$ salloc -–help []$ man salloc # Lots of options. # The bare minimum. # This will provide the defaults of one node, one core and 1G of memory. []$ salloc –A <project-name> -t <wall-time>

  • As with other Linux commands, there are short and long form for the options.

  • Format for: -t/--time: Acceptable time formats include "minutes", "minutes:seconds", "hours:minutes:seconds", "days-hours", "days-hours:minutes" and "days-hours:minutes:seconds".

Interactive Session: salloc: workshop

  • You’ll only use the reservation for this (and/or other) workshop.

  • Once you have an account you typically do not need it.

  • But there are use cases when we can create a specific reservation for you.

[]$ salloc –A <project-name> –t 1:00 --reservation=<reservation-name>

Interactive Session: squeue: What’s happening?

[]$ salloc -A <project-name> -t 1:00 --reservation=<reservation-name> salloc: Granted job allocation 13526337 salloc: Nodes m233 are ready for job # Make a note of the job id. # Notice the server/node name has changed. [arcc-t05@m233 intro_to_hpc]$ squeue -u arcc-t05 JOBID PARTITION NAME USER ST TIME NODES NODELIST(REASON) 13526337 moran interact arcc-t05 R 0:19 1 m233 # For an interactive session: Name = interact # You have the command-line interactively available to you. []$ ... []$ squeue -u arcc-t05 JOBID PARTITION NAME USER ST TIME NODES NODELIST(REASON) 13526337 moran interact arcc-t05 R 1:03 1 m233 # Session will automatically time out []$ salloc: Job 13526337 has exceeded its time limit and its allocation has been revoked. slurmstepd: error: *** STEP 13526337.interactive ON m233 CANCELLED AT 2024-03-22T09:36:53 DUE TO TIME LIMIT *** exit srun: Job step aborted: Waiting up to 32 seconds for job step to finish.

Interactive Session: salloc: Finished Early?

Submit Jobs: sbatch

Submit Jobs: sbatch: Example

Submit Jobs: squeue: What’s happening?

Submit Jobs: squeue: What’s happening? Continued

More squeue Information

The main Slurm squeue page.

Submission from your Current Working Directory

Submit Jobs: scancel: Cancel?

Submit Jobs: sacct: What happened?

The main Slurm sacct page.

Submit Jobs: sbatch: Options

Submit Jobs: sbatch: Options: Applied to Example

Extended Example: What Does the Run look Like?

 

 

Workshop Home

Intro to Job Scheduling

Next

Slurm: Workflows and Best Practices