Software

Slurm refers to processes as “tasks.” A task may be envisioned as an independent, running process. Slurm also refers to cores as “cpus” even though modern cpus contain several to many cores. If your program uses only one core it is a single, sequential task. If it can use multiple cores on the same node, it is generally regarded as a single task, with multiple cores assigned to that task. If it is a distributed code that can run on multiple nodes, each process would be a task.

We use Slurm, an open-source tool that manages jobs for Linux clusters. Jobs are submitted to the Slurm controller, which queues them until the system is ready to run them.