Overview

Teaching: min
Exercises: min

Questions

Objectives

• Understand HPC best practice

HPC Best Practice

• Don’t run jobs on login/head nodes
• Don’t run too many jobs at once. HPCW has a limit of 25 running and 50 queued jobs at once.
• Don’t use all the disk space on scratch. Don’t leave old files on there.
• Try to use all the cores on a node, especially if you take the node exclusively. Sometimes with large memory jobs this isn’t possible.
• Make jobs that last at least a few minutes, lots of small jobs creates excess load on the scheduler. Use something like GNU Parallel to make each Slurm job do several things.

Best Practices

Again, working on a cluster is working in a big sandbox, with people of all ages and skills. So it is important to work carefully and be considerate. Please visit our list of Common Pitfalls and Fair Use/Responsibilities pages so that you’ll be a good member of the community…

Common Pitfalls: https://rc.fas.harvard.edu/resources/documentation/common-odyssey-pitfalls/
Fair Use/Responsibilities: https://rc.fas.harvard.edu/resources/responsibilities/

Key Points