useful slurm commands

SLURM (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) is a powerful and widely used job scheduler for high-performance computing (HPC) systems. It helps manage and allocate resources efficiently across compute clusters. In this post, we’ll explore some of the most useful SLURM commands to help you manage your jobs and monitor resources effectively.

Job submission

sbatch

The sbatch command is used to submit a job script to the SLURM scheduler.

sbatch path/to/script.sh

Job queue monitoring

squeue

The squeue command displays information about jobs in the queue. You can view jobs for a specific user with the -u option.

squeue -u <your_username>

Common job states you might encounter in the output of squeue include:

• PD (Pending): The job is waiting to be scheduled.
• R (Running): The job is currently running.
• CG (Completing): The job is finishing its processes.
• CD (Completed): The job has finished successfully.
• F (Failed): The job has failed.

scontrol show job

scontrol show job <job_id>

The <job_id> can be found in one of the columns in the output of squeue.

Job management

scancel

The scancel command is used to cancel a job. You can cancel all jobs for a specific user with the -u option.

scancel -u <your_username>

Here are the more common slurm commands I use. For more information, please refer to the official documentation to know more about sacct, sacctmgr, salloc, sattach, sbcast, scrontab, sdiag, sh5util, sinfo, sprio, sreport, srun, sshare, sstat, strigger and sview