Available Partitions

Partitions are used on Swan to distinguish different resources. You can view the partitions with the command sinfo.

Swan:

Full list for Swan

Priority for short jobs

To run short jobs for testing and development work, a job can specify a different quality of service (QoS). The short QoS increases a jobs priority so it will run as soon as possible.

SLURM Specification
#SBATCH --qos=short
Limits per user for ‘short’ QoS
  • 6 hour job run time
  • 2 jobs of 16 CPUs or fewer
  • No more than 256 CPUs in use for short jobs from all users

Limitations of Jobs

Overall limitations of maximum job wall time. CPUs, etc. are set for all jobs with the default setting (when thea “–qos=” section is omitted) and “short” jobs (described as above) on Swan. The limitations are shown in the following form.

SLURM Specification Max Job Run Time Max CPUs per User Max Jobs per User
Default Leave blank 7 days 2000 1000
Short #SBATCH –qos=short 6 hours 16 2

Please also note that the memory and local hard drive limits are subject to the physical limitations of the nodes, described in the resources capabilities section of the HCC Documentation and the partition sections above.

Owned/Priority Access Partitions

Partitions marked as owned by a group means only specific groups are allowed to submit jobs to that partition.  Groups are manually added to the list allowed to submit jobs to the partition.  If you are unable to submit jobs to a partition, and you feel that you should be, please contact hcc-support@unl.edu.

To submit jobs to an owned partition, use the SLURM --partition option. Jobs can either be submitted only to an owned partition, or to both the owned partition and the general access queue. For example, assuming a partition named mypartition:

Submit only to an owned partition
#SBATCH --partition=mypartition

Submitting solely to an owned partition means jobs will start immediately until the resources on the partition are full, then queue until prior jobs finish and resources become available.

Submit to both an owned partition and general queue
#SBATCH --partition=mypartition,batch

Submitting to both an owned partition and batch means jobs will run on both the owned partition and the general batch queue. Jobs will start immediately until the resources on the partition are full, then queue. Pending jobs will then start either on the owned partition or in the general queue, wherever resources become available first (taking into account FairShare). Unless there are specific reasons to limit jobs to owned resources, this method is recommended to maximize job throughput.

Guest Partition

The guest partition can be used by users and groups that do not own dedicated resources on Swan.  Jobs running in the guest partition will run on the owned resources with Intel OPA interconnect.  The jobs are preempted when the resources are needed by the resource owners and are restarted on another node.

tmp_anvil Partition

We have put Anvil nodes which are not running Openstack in this partition. They have Intel Xeon E5-2650 v3 2.30GHz 2 CPU/20 cores and 256GB memory per node. However, they don’t have Infiniband or OPA interconnect. They are suitable for serial or single node parallel jobs. The nodes in this partition are subjected to be drained and move to our Openstack cloud when more cloud resources are needed without notice in advance.