How to request node features

Feature constraints allow you to tell the batch system that a job must only run on a certain subset (e.g. hardware generation) of nodes. See Slurm's documentation of the --constraint and --prefer options in the sbatch(1) and srun(1) man-pages for more detail.

Example: request a `farm19` node

#!/bin/sh
#SBATCH --constraint=farm19
srun hostname

Feature List

Generally speaking, jobs specified to require features not listed below will never run. They may queue indefinitely, or be outright rejected by the batch system upon submission. If you absolutely must continue to run such jobs, please submit your plan and timeline for no longer needing to as ServiceNow Incident.

Feature	Nodes
`el9`	with AlmaLinux 9 (redundant since June 18th, 2024, now that every available node is EL9)
`farm16`, `farm18`, `farm19`, `farm23`, `sciml19`, `sciml21`, `sciml23`, `sciml24`	by generation of hardware (see descriptions at scicomp.jlab.org.) `farm` are for CPU-only jobs and `sciml` for GPU jobs.
`cx4ib`	having ConnectX-4 IB HCAs (a subset of `farm19`)

It is intended that other requirements be able to expressed in terms of the above, e.g. Intel processors for CPU-only jobs would be farm16|farm18 and AMD would be farm19|farm23. Excluding the legacy mlx4 driver would be cx4ib|farm23. The most up-to-date information on what node features are available has can be queried directly from Slurm with sinfo -o %b. Please submit a ServiceNow incident if you are unable to express your job's requirements to Slurm.

How to request GPUs

We separate GPUs from the production partition. To use GPUs, you must use the gpu partition.