Overview
The batch system at SLAC uses the IBM Platform Load Sharing Facility, LSF, and is made up of
- a general farm of batch servers that is open to all SLAC users
- an mpi farm which requires that you request access (send email to unix-admin) and run only mpi jobs
various other farms of machines that belong to individual scientific computing groups.
Various scientific groups at SLAC contribute to the purchase of the general farm batch systems and jobs submitted to run in the general farm are scheduled according to a fairshare priority structure. If you are not part of a computing group that has a fairshare, your jobs will run according to the priority of the group called AllUsers.
Submitting Jobs to the General Farm
To submit jobs to the general farm you will need to
- have a SLAC unix account, www2.slac.stanford.edu/comp/slacwide/account/account.html
- login to a SLAC public machine using ssh
The public and general farm batch machines are described here http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/public-machines.html . The simplest command to submit a job to the general farm is
bsub <your job>
This command will submit your job to the first available general farm machine and will be able to run for 30 minutes of wall clock time. It is recommended to run your job specifying a wall clock time since LSF will use that information to make use of windows of opportunity on systems that are accumulating cores for mpi jobs that are not yet running, and your jobs will schedule more quickly. To specify a wall clock time:
bsub -W <time in minutes> <your job>
Documentation
There are manpages available for the various batch commands and there is full documentation for LSF here www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/package/lsf/currdoc/ .