Rocky Slurm

Slurm

Slurm is an open source, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable cluster management and job scheduling system for Linux clusters. As a cluster workload manager, Slurm has three key functions. First, it allocates exclusive and/or non-exclusive access to resources (compute nodes) to users for some duration of time so they can perform work. Second, it provides a framework for starting, executing, and monitoring work (normally a parallel job) on the set of allocated nodes. Finally, it arbitrates contention for resources by managing a queue of pending work.

You can learn more information at the Slurm website.

Commands

Slurm has many commands. Here are a few common ones you'll use when submitting jobs:

srun	A blocking command that submits a job in real time to the cluster.
sbatch	A non-blocking command that queues a job to be run as resources allow.
squeue	Shows information about queued jobs.
scancel	Cancel/Stop a job.

Submitting Jobs

The most common and preferred way to submit jobs is to create a shell script and then run it with sbatch.

myslurmjob.sh

#!/bin/bash

#SBATCH --job-name=myjob
#SBATCH --output=output.log

srun myprogram

In the script above you can see that we have the script interpreter in the first line, followed by some parameters to pass to the sbatch command, and then finally we use srun to run our program. The parameters we set are simply a name for the job and a name for the log file to put the job's output.

Now that our script is made we can queue it up using the sbatch command.

sbatch myslurmjob.sh