SLURM Advanced Topics: Glossary

It is possible to use Graphical User Interfaces when working on Hawk.

X11 is a system that enables the display of graphical windows from a remote server

Almost all popular SSH clients support X11

Hawk provides VNC capabilities that enables the use of a remote Linux desktop.

Nano, Vim and Emacs are the most common CLI Linux text editors

Gedit is also a common text editor with a graphical interface

Command line text editors might have a steep learning curve but are powerful

If you plan to spend a lot of time working on text files on Linux, it is worth mastering a CLI text editor.

Bash has built-in options that allow to check before executing if variables are set in a script.

Trapping errors early is very important and can save time and effort in the long run.

Writing maintainable shell scripts makes it easier to come back and read your code.

Do NOT run long jobs in the login nodes

Check your quota regularly

Submit jobs to appropriate partitions

srun is used to run an interactive job.

sbatch is used to queue a job script for later execution.

SLURM defines several environment variables that can be used within job scripts

Use replacement patterns to uniquely identify your log files

SLURM has several commands to help you interact with jobs and partitions

SLURM array jobs can be used to parallelize multiple tasks in a single script

GNU Parallel can be used similarly to array jobs but has additional features like resubmission capabilities

SLURM allow us to create jobs pipelines with its –dependency option

Hawk has a Quality of Service feature on partitions that sets limits to users on how many jobs can queued, run at the same time, maximum number of CPUs and nodes

SCW systems offer P100 and V100 generation GPU devices

GPUs are treated as a consumable resource and need to be requested explicitly

CUDA libraries are only available on GPU partitions, dev and login nodes

Users can control their own software when needed for development.

OpenOndemand is a powerful way to access GUIs.

Accessing Hawk compute nodes directly requires some care but can be powerful in running some tools.