Sludge is a terminal UI for SLURM, a cluster management and job scheduling system. To learn more about it, head over to the documentation site.

Installation

Linux

Create a bin directory and download the sludge binary there.

mkdir -p $HOME/bin
cd $HOME/bin
wget -P $HOME/bin https://github.com/samredai/sludge/releases/download/0.1.0-alpha.1/sludge-linux-amd64 -O sludge
chmod +x $HOME/bin/sludge

Add the bin directory to your PATH variable by including the following in your ~/.bashrc file.

export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

Usage

The sludge terminal UI can be opened using the sludge command.

sludge

The sludge UI can be closed using either Ctrl+C or Ctrl+D.

Filtering to a Specific User

The --username argument opens sludge with all views filtered to a specific user.

sludge --username samredai

Filtering to a Specific Account

The --account argument opens sludge with all views filtered to a specific account.

sludge --account heavy_metal_lab

Jobs Page

You can view all jobs on the SLURM cluster by going to the jobs page [Ctrl+J]. Selecting a job will reveal more information about the job in the center pane, such as number of nodes, number of CPUs, and the number of threads per core.

Nodes Page

You can view all nodes on the SLURM cluster by going to the nodes page [Ctrl+N]. Selecting a node will reveal more information about the node in the center pane, such as the architechture, the number of cores and the CPU load.

Reports Page

Sludge lets you run various reports on the SLURM cluster and displays the results. On the reports page [Ctrl+R], you can select which report you want to run in the left pane. Once the results are ready, they will be displayed in the center pane. The reports are submitted using the sreport command line utility that comes with SLURM.

Actions

The actions menus can be found in the top right pane and contains various forms that can be used to run common actions against the SLURM cluster such as submitting a script using sbatch or running an analysis to determine the best partition for a particular script.

Submit Script Action

You can submit a script to run on the SLURM cluster using the Submit Script action. In addition to the script name, you can include additional sbatch options as arguments. See the sbatch documentation to see all available options.

Find Best Partition Action

You can find the SLURM partition with the minimum delay for starting a particular script using the Find Best Partition action. This uses the open source BestSlurmPartition utility created by the research computing team at the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences (FASRC).

To use the action, simply select it in the actions pane and enter the path to the script you’d like to find the best partition for. Relative paths are calculated from the directory where the sludge UI was launched.