Slurm quickstart¶

An HPC cluster is made up of a number of compute nodes, which consist of one or more processors, memory and in the case of the GPU nodes, GPUs. The resource manager allocates these computing resources to the user. This is achieved through the submission of jobs by the user. A job describes the computing resources required to run application(s) and how to run it. LUMI uses Slurm as job scheduler and resource manager.

To run jobs, you need a project allocation. You need to specify your project ID in your job script (or via the command line when submitting your job) in order for your job to be accepted by the job scheduler.

Info

You can use the lumi-allocations command to list the projects of which you are a member. This command will also list your allocated and used compute and storage billing units.

Alternative is to use the groups command: you should see that you are part of a group named project_xxxxxxxxx.

Slurm commands overview¶

In the following, you will learn how to submit your job using the Slurm Workload Manager. If you're familiar with Slurm, you probably won't learn much. However, If you aren't acquainted with Slurm, the following will introduce you to the basics. If you would like to play around with Slurm in a sandboxed environment before submitting real jobs on LUMI, we highly recommend that you try the interactive SlurmLearning tutorial.

The main commands for using Slurm are summarized in the table below.

Command	Description
`sbatch`	Submit a batch script
`srun`	Run a parallel job(step)
`squeue`	View information about jobs in the scheduling queue
`scancel`	Signal or cancel jobs, job arrays or job steps
`sinfo`	View information about nodes and partitions

Creating a batch script¶

The most common type of job is a batch job. They are submitted to the scheduler using a batch job script and the sbatch command.

A batch job script is a text file containing information about the job to be run: the amount of computing resource and the tasks that must be executed.

A batch script is summarized by the following steps:

the interpreter to use for the execution of the script: bash, python, ...
directives that define the job options: resources, run time, ...
setting up the environment: prepare input, environment variables, ...
run the application(s)

As an example, let's look at this batch job script:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=exampleJob
#SBATCH --account=myAmazingProject
#SBATCH --time=02:00:00
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --mem=2G
#SBATCH --partition=small

module load MyApp/1.2.3

srun myapp -i input -o output

In the previous example, the first line #!/bin/bash specifies that the script should be interpreted as a bash script.

The lines starting with #SBATCH are directives for the workload manager. These have the general syntax

#SBATCH option_name=argument

Now that we have introduced this syntax, we can go through the directives one by one. The first directive is

#SBATCH --job-name=exampleJob

which sets the name of the job. It can be used to identify a job in the queue and other listings. The second directive sets the billing project for the job

#SBATCH --account=myAmazingProject

Specify the account

The account option is mandatory. Failing to set it will cause the following error:

Unable to allocate resources: Job violates accounting/QOS policy 
(job submit limit, user's size and/or time limits)

The remaining lines specify the resources needed for the job. The first one is the maximum time your job can run. If your job exceeds the time limit, it is terminated regardless of whether it has finished or not.

#SBATCH --time=02:00:00

The time format is hh:mm:ss (or d-hh:mm:ss where d is the number of days). Therefore, in our example, the time limit is 2 hours.

The next four lines of the script describe the computing resources that the job will need to run

#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --mem=2G

In this instance, we request one task (process) to be run on one node. A task corresponds to a process (or an MPI rank). One CPU thread (used, for example, with OpenMP) is requested for the one task as well as 2 GiB of memory should be allocated to the whole job.

The next line defines the Slurm partition to which the job will be submitted. Slurm partitions are (possibly overlapping) groups of nodes with similar resources or associated limits. In our example, the job doesn't use a lot of resources and will fit perfectly onto the small partition.

#SBATCH --partition=small

Now that the needed resources for the job have been defined, the next step is to set up the environment. For example, copy input data from your home directory to the scratch file system or export environment variables.

module load MyApp/1.2.3

In our example, we load a module so that the MyApp application is available to the batch job. Finally, with everything set up, we can launch our program using the srun command.

srun myapp -i input -o output

More details may be found on the dedicated batch jobs page.

Submit a batch job¶

To submit the job script we just created, we use the sbatch command. The general syntax can be condensed as

$ sbatch [options] job_script [job_script_arguments ...]

The available options are the same as the one you use in the batch script: sbatch --nodes=2 in the command line and #SBATCH --nodes=2 in a batch script are equivalent. The command line value takes precedence if the same option is present both on the command line and as a directive in a script.

For the moment, let's limit ourselves to the most common way to use the sbatch: passing the name of the batch script which contains the submission options.

$ sbatch myjob.sh
Submitted batch job 123456

The sbatch command returns immediately. If the job is successfully submitted, the command prints out the ID number of the job.

More details may be found on the dedicated batch jobs page.

Examine the queue¶

Once you have submitted your batch script, it won't necessarily run immediately. It may wait in the queue of pending jobs for some time before its required resources become available. To view your jobs in the queue, use the squeue command.

$ squeue
  JOBID PARTITION     NAME     USER  ST       TIME  NODES NODELIST(REASON)
 123456     small exampleJ lumi_usr  PD       0:00      1 (Priority)

The output shows the state of your job in the ST column. In our case, the job is pending (PD). The last column indicates the reason why the job isn't running: Priority. This indicates that your job is queued behind a higher priority job. One other possible reason can be that your job is waiting for resources to become available. In such a case, the value in the REASON column will be Resources.

Let's look at the information that will be shown if your job is running:

$ squeue
  JOBID PARTITION     NAME     USER  ST       TIME  NODES NODELIST(REASON)
 123456     small exampleJ lumi_usr   R      35:00      1 node-0123

The ST column will now display a R value (for RUNNING). The TIME column will represent the time your job has been running. The list of nodes on which your job is executing is given in the last column of the output.

In practice, the list of jobs printed by this command will be much longer since all jobs, including those belonging to other users, will be visible. To see only the jobs that belong to you, use the squeue command with the --me flag.

$ squeue --me

The squeue command can also be used to determine when your pending job will start.

$ squeue --me --start
 JOBID PARTITION     NAME     USER ST          START_TIME  NODES SCHEDNODES           NODELIST(REASON)
123456     batch Computat   vananh PD 2021-06-01T16:10:28      1 node0012             (Priority)
123457     batch Computat   vananh PD 2021-06-01T18:21:28      1 (null)               (Priority)

In our example, both jobs listed will start June 1 at different times. You will also notice that for the first job, the scheduler plan to run the job on node0012 while for the second job, no node has been chosen yet.

Cancelling a job¶

Sometimes things just don't go as planned. If your job doesn't run as expected, you may need to cancel your job. This can be achieved using the scancel command which takes the job ID of the job to cancel.

$ scancel <jobid>

The job ID can be obtained from the output of the sbatch command when submitting your job or by using squeue. The scancel command applies to either a pending job waiting in the queue or to an already running job. In the first case, the job will simply be removed from the queue while in the latter, the execution will be stopped.