Running jobs¶

CPU jobs¶

Interactive CPU jobs¶

You can request an interactive CPU job with the srun Slurm command.

# Request 1 cpu on 1 node
srun --pty /bin/bash

# Exit from the compute node to request a new node
exit # or hit ctrl+d

Batch CPU jobs¶

You can schedule a batch with the sbatch Slurm command which will place the job onto the job queue. The suggested workflow is to debug and get things working with srun and then transition into putting jobs into the queue. Here is an example sbatch script:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --time=10:00
#SBATCH --job-name=Example 

gcc --version  # prints out the gcc version.

python --version  # prints out the python version.  Replace this with a python call to whatever file.

sleep 5

Submit the job¶

Once your batch script is ready, you can submit it to the scheduler with:

$ sbatch cpu_job.sh
Submitted batch job 123456

Upon success, sbatch will return the ID it has assigned to the job (in this example, 123456)

Check the job¶

After submission, your job will enter the queue in the PENDING state. When resources become available and your job has sufficient priority, it will start running (RUNNING state). If it completes successfully, it will transition to COMPLETED. Otherwise, it may show FAILED or another terminal state.

Use squeue to check the status of your job:

$ squeue -u $USER
     JOBID   PARTITION    NAME      USER ST   TIME  NODES NODELIST(REASON)
    123456     compute Example <username> R    0:12    1   compute-permanent-node-535

Slurm output file¶

By default, Slurm writes any output from your script to a file named slurm-.out. You can list the contents of that output file as follows (using the same job ID that was returned by sbatch):

$ cat slurm-123456.out
gcc (GCC) 9.4.0
Python 3.12.2

You can customize the output file name by addin gdirectives (e.g., #SBATCH --output=myjob.out) in your sbatch script or specifying them at the command line.