Slurm commands

A cheatsheet of Slurm commands.

Motivation #

Once logged into the CCB cluster, a number of Slurm commands can be used to query resources available and the current workload.

In this page, we provide a cheatsheet of the most commonly used commands along with a brief description of their purpose and advice on best practices.

Partitions #

Summary information about partitions (i.e., individual job queues) can be accessed as follows.

sinfo

The sinfo command displays the name of partitions in the first column, and additional information in a customisable set of additional columns. The full list of fields and their description can be found in the Slurm documentation →.

In the example above:

• The asterisk symbol * indicates the default partition, to which jobs are submitted when users don’t request a specific queue.
• The field AVAIL uses the value up to indicates partition that are accepting new jobs.
• The field TIMELIMIT indicates the maximum time limit allowed for jobs submitted to each partition (in the format hours:minutes:seconds). The value infinite is used to identify partitions without a job time limit.
• The field NODES indicates the number of nodes with each particular configuration in each partition.
• The field STATE indicates the state of nodes in each partition; for instance:
  • The value alloc indicates nodes allocated to one or more jobs.
  • The value idle indicates nodes that are not allocated to any job.
  • The value mixed indicates nodes where some CPUs are allocated a job while others are idle.
  • The value drain indicates nodes that are currently executing jobs, but do not accept new jobs, per administrator request (e.g., for maintenance).

Nodes #

The full list of individual nodes and associated information can be obtained as follows.

sinfo --Node --long

In particular:

• The --Node option reports a separate line for each node in each partition (a node can be shared by multiple partitions).
• The --long option reports more detailed information.

More detailed information about the configuration of each individual nodes can be obtained as follows.

scontrol show node

The full list of nodes above may be excessive. Information about a particular node can be obtained as follows.

scontrol show node <nodename>

Replace <nodename> by the name of the particular node.