Table of Contents

SLURM helpfull tips and hints

Do not overallocate resources

With SLURM for your own sake it is important not to overallocate the resources while pending time slot for the computing job. If you overallocate then your job will be pending for resources for a long time.

For example if you request 50 GB of RAM for you computing job while it actually uses 5 GB. Then the job will wait for computing slot for 50 GB of job and this could mean that you will wait computing time for multiple days. Or if you are running multiple jobs parallel then your jobs will run one by one instead of running all jobs at the same time.

Other users also will suffer while they are waiting for computing resources that are reserved for no reason.

Use local SSD of the computing node

Each computing node has 300 GB of local storage and it is mounted to the /tmp path. For the computing jobs that write temporary results you could get much greater performance by using the local storage instead of the network drive.

Monitor your jobs

You can monitor the resources usage with the Grafana dashboard

Slurm job efficiency report

You should also check the Slurm job efficiency report for the completed jobs. This way you will find out how much was your CPU, memory and wall time usage. With these informations you can fine tune your jobs and not overallocate the computing cluster.


seff JOBID

Job ID: JOBID
Array Job ID: JOBID_408
Cluster: bic
User/Group: user/domain users
State: COMPLETED (exit code 0)
Cores: 1
CPU Utilized: 01:31:27
CPU Efficiency: 166.17% of 00:55:02 core-walltime
Job Wall-clock time: 00:55:02
Memory Utilized: 10.26 GB
Memory Efficiency: 16.42% of 62.50 GB