Managing Batch Jobs

Managing Batch Jobs

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This page is under construction! We cannot guarantee completion or accuracy of information herein while in development.

Overview

It may be helpful to get information about queued, running, or past jobs. There are several functionalities within Slurm that can help with this process. Note that all of the following commands are contextual to the current cluster. To view commands on a different cluster, type the name of that cluster, and then run the command. 

Queued & Running Jobs

To see jobs that are in the queue or currently running on the current cluster, use squeue --user $USER. Note that this command will not show jobs that have finished via completion, cancellation, or any other reason. 

Previous Jobs

Users may want to review details of past jobs, or to study their performance to improve future jobs. The following commands may help:

  • past-jobs

  • job-history

  • seff

SLURM and System Commands

Additional helpful commands are included here. For a complete list of Slurm commands and options, please refer to the official Slurm documentation.

Command

Purpose

Example(s)

Native Slurm Commands

sbatch

Submits a batch script for execution

sbatch script.slurm

srun

Run parallel jobs. Can be in place of mpirun/mpiexec. Can be used interactively as well as in batch scripts

srun -n 1 --mpi=pmi2 a.out

salloc

Requests a session to  work on a compute node interactively

see: Interactive Jobs

squeue

Checks the status of pending and running jobs

squeue --job $JOBID
squeue --user $NETID

scancel

Cancel a running or pending job

scancel $JOBID
scancel -u $NETID

scontrol hold

Place a hold on a job to prevent it from being executed

scontrol hold $JOBID

scontrol release

Releases a hold placed on a job allowing it to be executed

scontrol release $JOBID

System Commands

va

Displays your group membership, your account usage, and CPU allocation. Short for "view allocation"

va

interactive

Shortcut for quickly requesting an interactive job. Use "interactive --help" to get full usage. 

interactive -a $GROUP_NAME

job-history

Retrieves a running or completed job's history in a user-friendly format

job-history $JOBID

seff

Retrieves a completed job's memory and CPU efficiency

seff $JOBID

past-jobs

Retrieves past jobs run by user. Can be used with option "-d N" to search for jobs run in the past N days.

past-jobs -d 5

job-limits

View your group's job resource limits and current usage.

job-limits $GROUP

nodes-busy

Display a visualization of nodes on a cluster and their usage

nodes-busy --help

system-busy

Display a text-based summary of a cluster's usage

system-busy

cluster-busy

Display a visualization of all three cluster's overall usage

cluster-busy --help