[slurm-users] Slurm commands for launching tasks: salloc and sbatch

[Mike Mikailov]

They should not affect the task performance.

May be the cluster configuration allocated slow machines for salloc. 

salloc and sbatch have different purposes:

salloc is used to allocate a set of resources to a job. Once the resources have been allocated, the user can run a command or script on the allocated resources.
sbatch is used to submit a batch script to Slurm. The batch script contains a list of commands or scripts that will be executed on the allocated resources.
In general, salloc is used for jobs that need to be run interactively, such as jobs that require a shell or jobs that need to be debugged. sbatch is used for jobs that can be run in the background, such as long-running jobs or jobs that are submitted by a queuing system.

Here is a table that summarizes the key differences between salloc and sbatch:

Feature	salloc	sbatch
Purpose	Allocate resources and run a command or script	Submit a batch script
Interactive	Yes	No
Background	No	Yes
Queuing system	No	Yes
Here are some examples of how to use salloc and sbatch:

To allocate 2 nodes with 4 CPUs each and run the command ls, you would use the following command:
Code snippet
salloc -N 2 -c 4 ls
To submit a batch script called my_job.sh that contains the command python my_script.py, you would use the following command:
Code snippet
sbatch my_job.sh
For more information on salloc and sbatch, please see the following documentation:

salloc documentation: https://slurm.schedmd.com/salloc.html
sbatch documentation: https://slurm.schedmd.com/sbatch.html


Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 4, 2023, at 8:22 AM, Татьяна Озерова <tanyaozerova1318 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hello! I have question about way of launching tasks in Slurm. I use the service in cloud and submit an application with sbatch or salloc. As far as I am concerned, the commands are similar: they allocate resources for counting users tasks and run them. However, I have received different results in cluster performance for the same task (task execution time is too long in case of salloc). So my question is what is the difference between these two commands, that can affect on task performance? Thank you beforehand.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.schedmd.com/pipermail/slurm-users/attachments/20230704/82b6df9a/attachment.htm>