Purdue University

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 Gilbreth 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 showpartitions and slist commands respectively. Any job that does not specify an account and a partition will be rejected at submission time.
• All jobs on the cluster must include an explicit memory request through use of the --mem option. Jobs that do not make an explicit memory request will be rejected and a reasonable default will be suggested.
• Accounts will be renamed to no longer include a suffix designating the type of resource the account contains. This means that groups with multiple types of resources broken into multiple accounts will be consolidated into a single group.
• GPU type will be requested through specifying a partition containing the GPU type rather than submission to an account with a suffix designating that partition. i.e. jobs previously submitted to -A mylab-k will now be specified as -A mylab -p a100-40gb
• The output of slist and the default output of squeue will be modified to reflect the new scheduler design.
• All "shared accounts" such as standby 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 standby option, you would now use -A mylab -q standby

How will this affect you:

1. You will need to change your jobscripts and your method of invocation to include the required options outlined above.
2. If you have any scripts or tooling that rely on the current output of slist or squeue, 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.