Bell Scheduler Modernization
As part of an ongoing effort to utilize modern features in the Slurm scheduler and to streamline the process of usage reporting for research groups--something that is often requested by various PIs, the scheduler configurations on the Bell cluster will be modified in an upcoming maintenance . Users will be required to update their job scripts to conform to the guidelines described below.
- All jobs on the cluster will be required to explicitly specify a partition and an account (i.e. your group's name) at submission time. You can find the names of the available partitions and accounts from the
showpartitionsandslistcommands respectively. Any job that does not specify an account and a partition will be rejected at submission time. - The output of
slistand the default output ofsqueuewill be modified to reflect the new scheduler design. - All "shared accounts" such as
standby,highmem, etc. that represent resources outside of your typical "group accounts" will continue to exist but will require a different request syntax.- Standby will become a Quality of Service (QoS) and jobs that previously ran under the "standby" account, will now be submitted to your "group account" and be tagged with the standby QoS. I.e. if your job previously used the
-A standbyoption, you would now use-A mylab -q standby - The
highmemandgpushared accounts will become partitions and jobs that previously ran under these accounts will now be submitted to your "group account" and should be submitted to the appropriate partition, i.e.,-A highmemwill become-A mylab -p highmem
- Standby will become a Quality of Service (QoS) and jobs that previously ran under the "standby" account, will now be submitted to your "group account" and be tagged with the standby QoS. I.e. if your job previously used the
| Use Case | Old Syntax | New Syntax | What Changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Submit a job to your group's account | sbatch -A mygroup |
sbatch -A mygroup -p cpu |
The cpu partition must be specified. |
| Submit a standby job | sbatch -A standby |
sbatch -A mygroup -q standby -p cpu |
standby is now a QoS instead of an account |
| Submit a highmem job | sbatch -A highmem |
sbatch -A mygroup -p highmem |
highmem is now a partition instead of an account |
| Submit a gpu job | sbatch -A gpu |
sbatch -A mygroup -p gpu |
gpu is now a partition instead of an account |
| Submit a multigpu job | sbatch -A multigpu |
sbatch -A mygroup -p multigpu |
multigpu is now a partition instead of an account |
How will this affect you:
- You will need to change your jobscripts and your method of invocation to include the required options outlined above.
- If you have any scripts or tooling that rely on the current output of
slistorsqueue, those scripts will need to be modified to use the new formatted output.
You can prepare for this maintenance by reviewing the new Slurm organization in our user guide's Queues Page.
If you have any questions about these upcoming changes, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.