Interactive shell with SLURM

I just discovered a half-broken blueprint script that was supposed to open an interactive bash session within a newly allocated SLURM job. I typically allocate interactive sessions when I want to test a specific benchmark configuration on a particular machine or type of machine.

I always forget the exact command, so here is a fixed, i.e. working for me, line:

srun -n 1 --mem-per-cpu=100 -t 10:00 --pty bash -i

The line will have SLURM allocate a new resource with 1 task (-n 1) and 100 mb of memory (–mem-per-cpu 200). The job will live for 10 minutes (-t 10:00) and start a bash within it. I frequently also add the SLURM flag for exclusivity (–exclusive).

Please be aware that if your compute center operates with compute quotas the exclusivity will result in increased compute time consumed. Since you are practically allocating all machines for your own, you also occupy all CPUs. As a result, independent of the number of CPUs your job actually uses, the whole machine will be accounted, i.e. #number_of_cores * runtime_of_job.

Hello world!

Like pretty much every tutorial for every programming language, this website starts with a “Hello world!”, yet, I still need to create the content.

I plan to use this website mainly as my “useful notes” archive and write about day-to-day tasks and observations, like benchmarking or how I work with vim.