Compute Partitions

There are several different Slurm partitions for different purposes and having different characteristics. The partitions are collected into the following groups based on what they provide:

• CPU Partitions
• GPU Partitions

Which partition to choose?

If you do not request a partition, your job will be placed in the default partition, which is standard96 on the NHR cluster and medium on the SCC cluster. The default partitions are suitable for most calculations.

Many partitions have variants with a suffix like :SUFFIX appended to the (e.g. medium40:shared). The NAME:test partitions are, as the name suggests, intended for shorter and smaller test runs. These have a higher priority and a few dedicated nodes, but are limited in time and number of nodes. On NAME:shared partitions, where it is possible to use less than a full node, are suitable for pre- and postprocessing. A job running on a shared node is only accounted for its core/GPU/memory fraction it uses (the maximum of each resource is taken). All non-shared nodes are exclusive to one job, which implies that full compute cost per node are paid.

The available home/local-ssd/work/perm storages are discussed in Storage Systems.

An overview of all partitions and node statuses is provided by running

sinfo -r

To see detailed information about a node’s type, run

scontrol show node <nodename>