The National Competence Center for High-Performance Computing (HPC) in the Czech Republic is offering an online course on 14 September 2023, to assist users in migrating from Portable Batch System PBS to Slurm scheduler. The course covers Slurm's fundamental concepts, job submission process, terminology, and environment variables.
The scheduler is a type of software that operates a batch system on an HPC cluster. Normally, users do not perform their calculations directly and interactively like they would on their personal workstations or laptops. Instead, they submit non-interactive batch jobs to the scheduler. The scheduler saves the batch jobs, assesses their resource needs and priorities, and distributes the jobs to appropriate compute nodes. Every scheduler has three main goals: to minimize the time between the job submission and finishing the job, to optimize CPU utilization, and to maximize the job throughput. PBS and Slurm are two of the most used schedulers on HPC clusters.
