Slurm

USC HPC is moving to slurm job manager so here are some notes on using that system at HPC.

HPC website

• SLURM at HPC

Converting from Torque (PBS) to Slurm

Here are differences between SLURM and Torque.

1. SLURM seems much snappier, at least at Stampede. I can submit a job, then immediately check the job status, and if there are available resources it will have already started. Torque (at HPC as least) has a scheduling delay
2. SLURM can be annoying with placement of STDOUT/STDERR files. I believe that by default it puts them in your home directly? Or maybe it's poor naming, I can't quite remember. I ended up creating a script called "qsub" (because I'm used to that command) which does the following to give Torque style .o<ID> and .e<ID> files in the submission directory:

    sbatch -o ${1}.o%j -e ${1}.e%j $1

1. There are different command for managing jobs. The basic ones are:
   1. qstat -u kmilner => squeue -u kmilner
   2. qdel <job-id> => scancel <job-id>
   3. qsub <job-file> => sbatch <job-file) (or use my command above)
2. The headers are different. Here are equivalent headers for the same job, with Stampede2 style syntax (might be slightly different for HPCC)

SLURM:

#SBATCH -t 00:60:00
#SBATCH -N 2
#SBATCH -n 40
#SBATCH -p scec

PBS (Torque):

#PBS -q scec
#PBS -l walltime=00:60:00,nodes=2:ppn=20
#PBS -V

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