Helix/Slurm

1 General information about Slurm

The bwForCluster Helix uses Slurm as batch system.

• Slurm documentation: https://slurm.schedmd.com/documentation.html
• Slurm cheat sheet: https://slurm.schedmd.com/pdfs/summary.pdf
• Slurm tutorials: https://slurm.schedmd.com/tutorials.html

2 Slurm Command Overview

Slurm commands	Brief explanation
sbatch	Submits a job and queues it in an input queue
squeue	Displays information about active, eligible, blocked, and/or recently completed jobs
scontrol	Displays detailed job state information
scancel	Cancels a job

3 Job Submission

Batch jobs are submitted with the command:

$ sbatch <job-script>

A job script contains options for Slurm in lines beginning with #SBATCH as well as your commands which you want to execute on the compute nodes. For example:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --partition=XXX
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --time=00:20:00
#SBATCH --mem=1gb
#SBATCH --export=NONE
echo 'Hello world'

This jobs requests one core (--ntasks=1) and 1 GB memory (--mem=1gb) for 20 minutes (--time=00:20:00) on nodes provided by the partition 'XXX'.

For the sake of a better reproducibility of jobs it is recommended to use the option --export=NONE to prevent the propagation of environment variables from the submit session into the job environment and to load required software modules in the job script.