Overview

The batch system at SLAC uses the IBM Platform Load Sharing Facility, LSF, and is made up of

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

  1. have a SLAC unix account
  2. 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>