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Accessing the Compute Nodes

Anvil uses the Slurm Workload Manager for job scheduling and management. With Slurm, a user requests resources and submits a job to a queue. The system takes jobs from queues, allocates the necessary compute nodes, and executes them. While users will typically SSH to an Anvil login node to access the Slurm job scheduler, they should note that Slurm should always be used to submit their work as a job rather than run computationally intensive jobs directly on a login node. All users share the login nodes, and running anything but the smallest test job will negatively impact everyone's ability to use Anvil.

Anvil is designed to serve the moderate-scale computation and data needs of the majority of ACCESS users. Users with allocations can submit to a variety of queues with varying job size and walltime limits. Separate sets of queues are utilized for the CPU, GPU, and large memory nodes. Typically, queues with shorter walltime and smaller job size limits will feature faster turnarounds. Some additional points to be aware of regarding the Anvil queues are:

  • Anvil provides a debug queue for testing and debugging codes.
  • Anvil supports shared-node jobs (more than one job on a single node). Many applications are serial or can only scale to a few cores. Allowing shared nodes improves job throughput, provides higher overall system utilization and allows more users to run on Anvil.
  • Anvil supports long-running jobs - run times can be extended to four days for jobs using up to 16 full nodes.
  • The maximum allowable job size on Anvil is 7,168 cores. To run larger jobs, submit a consulting ticket to discuss with Anvil support.
  • Shared-node queues will be utilized for managing jobs on the GPU and large memory nodes.
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