About the Slurm Beta
The RCD team is excited to welcome users to the Slurm Beta program on the Palmetto Cluster.
Since its inception in 2008, the Palmetto Cluster has used the Portable Batch System (PBS) to schedule and manage jobs on the cluster. Our team is working on creating a new and improved version of the cluster with a different scheduling system, the Slurm workload manager.
By participating in this beta program, you can help RCD prepare for the future of HPC at Clemson University.
How can I get ready for Slurm?
Sign up for one of our training workshops to learn more about how to work with Slurm.
What is Slurm?
Slurm is a workload management tool that is designed to work with multiple Linux systems in a cluster environment. Its primary functions are is to job scheduling and resource allocation.
What makes Slurm different from PBS?
Under the hood, there are many differences between Slurm and PBS. However, most of these differences are transparent to users.
The primary difference that users will notice is different commands. For
example, instead of using qsub, users must use srun, sbatch, or salloc.
Users are encouraged to review the Slurm Migration Help page for a direct comparison between the two systems and advice on how to convert existing workflows.
Why move to Slurm?
The way PBS handles scheduling often results in jobs getting stuck in the incorrect queue or never running. The switch to Slurm allows users to have more control over when, where, and how their jobs get scheduled and since Slurm has built in fair share calculations, jobs that may end up getting stuck in queue, either due to request size or rare/limited resources, will always end up running. Switching to Slurm also allows RCD to add more features to job scheduling, resulting in an overall better experience for Users on Palmetto 2. Since all the scheduling is done automatically by Slurm, instead of pseudo-manually with PBS, this also opens up RCD to better help users by developing helpful tools for Palmetto.
What is the Slurm Beta program?
The purpose of our Slurm Beta program is to create a test environment where both our users and system administrators can experiment with Slurm. This environment will run in parallel with the production
How can I participate in the Slurm Beta?
The Slurm Beta is in the final stage of testing. Access to the Slurm cluster is controlled via ColdFront. For access, the faculty advisor must:
- Create a project in ColdFront.
- Add users to the project.
- Request an allocation for Palmetto 2 General Queue to the project.
Slurm is in a Beta phase and there will be ongoing changes to policies and queueing to fit user demand and usage.
We plan to move into an open-access beta by the Summer 2024 semester.