Interactive Work

In order to test or visualize, it is sometimes handy to allocate resources for an interactive job. Slurm provides two commands to facilitate this: srun and salloc.

Simple Interactive Work via srun#

To get an interactive shell you can just run:

srun --pty -p <partition name> -A <account name> bash -i

You can reserve more time, memory, or CPUs as well.

Interactive Allocation via salloc#

To quote the official documentation: salloc is used to allocate a Slurm job allocation, which is a set of resources (nodes), possibly with some set of constraints (e.g. number of processors per node). When salloc successfully obtains the requested allocation, it then runs the command specified by the user.

An example:

salloc -N 2 -p parallel-A zdvhpc
  salloc: Granted job allocation 3242
  salloc: Waiting for resource configuration
  salloc: Nodes z[0001-0002] are ready for job
# now you can use two nodes and start the desired application
# e.g.
srun -N1 [other parameters] <some application confined on one node>
srun [other parameters] <some application triggered on all nodes>
srun [other parameters] <some mpi application>
# do not forget to type 'exit' or else you will be working in a subshell
exit

During a session with salloc you may log in to the allocated nodes (with SSH) and monitor their behaviour. This can be handy to estimate memory usage, too.

ssh <allocated node>