Slurm Quick Start

This page explains how to get the configure and run a batch job on the SLURM cluster from the head node.

1. Configuring SLURM

Slurm has 2 entities: a slurmctld controller node and multiple slurmd host nodes where we can run jobs in parallel.

To start the slurm controller on a machine we need to give this command from root:

$ systemctl start slurmctld.service

After running this, we can verify that slurm controller is running by viewing the log with the command:

$ tail /var/log/slurmctld.log

The nodes should be configured to run with the controller. You can see the information about available nodes using this command:

$ sinfo

2. Running a Slurm Batch Job on Multiple Nodes

We can create python scripts and run these scripts in parallel on the cluster nodes. This is a simple example where we will print the task number from each node.

Create a Python Script

First we create a Python script which prints the system task number:

#!/usr/bin/python
# import sys library (needed for accepted command line args)
import sys
# print task number
print('Hello! I am a task number: ', sys.argv[1])