04 What is a Job

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What is a job?

Objectives

• Understand the difference in running jobs locally and on HPC system.

• Understand what function a job serves in the HPC environment.

A job

• Accessing HPC cluster resources requires requesting them from a scheduler.
• Our scheduler is Slurm, other institution may use another scheduler.
• A successful request (via srun or sbatch) to the scheduler creates a job.
• This job is appended to the queue and is executed once resources become available (sometimes immediately).
• The job is then transferred to the resources and executed (shell script for sbatch or terminal for srun).

Key Points

• Understand the difference in running jobs locally and on HPC system.

• Understand what function a job serves in the hpc environment.