Running Applications

Users will run their applications on the cluster in either interactive mode or in batch mode. Interactive mode ( salloc or srun command) is familiar to anyone using the command line: the user specifies an application by name and various arguments, hits Enter, and the application runs. However, in interactive mode on a cluster the user is automatically switched from using a login node to using a compute node. This keeps all the intense computation off the login nodes, so that login nodes can have all the resources necessary for managing the cluster. You should always use interactive mode when you are running your application but not using batch mode. Please do not run your applications on the login nodes, use the interactive mode.

Compute jobs are run on functional groups of nodes called partitions or queues. Each different partition has different capabilities (e.g. regular memory versus high memory nodes) and resource restrictions (e.g. time limits on jobs). Nodes may appear in several partitions.

Allocation of cores, memory, and time on the HPC

To provide better Ceres usage report all Ceres users have been assigned Slurm accounts based on their project groups. If you don’t have a project, then your default and only Slurm account is sandbox.

All compute nodes have 1.5 TB of fast local temporary data file storage space supported by SSDs. This local scratch space is significantly faster and supports more input/output operations per second (IOPS) than the mounted filesystems on which the home and project directories reside.

List of basic CLI commands