Sherlock changelog

Final hours announced for the June 2023 SRCF downtime

by Kilian Cavalotti, Technical Lead & Architect, HPC
Maintenance
Announce
As previously announced, the Stanford Research Computing Facility (SRCF), where Sherlock is hosted, will be powered off during the last week of June, in order to safely bring up power to the new SRCF2 datacenter. Sherlock will not be

A new tool to help optimize job resource requirements

by Kilian Cavalotti, Technical Lead & Architect, HPC
It’s not always easy to determine the right amount of resources to request for a computing job. Making sure that the application will have enough resources to run properly, but avoiding over-requests that would make the jobs spend too much
Documentation
Scheduler
Improvement

SRCF is expanding

by Kilian Cavalotti, Technical Lead & Architect, HPC
Maintenance
In order to bring up a new building that will increase data center capacity, a full SRCF power shutdown is planned for late June 2023. It’s expected to last about a week, and Sherlock will be unavailable during that time.

Job #1, again!

by Kilian Cavalotti, Technical Lead & Architect, HPC
This is not the first time, we’ve been through this already (not so long ago, actually) but today, the Slurm job id counter was reset and went from job #67043327 back to job #1.
Event
Scheduler

A new interactive step in Slurm

by Kilian Cavalotti, Technical Lead & Architect, HPC
A new version of the sh_dev tool has been released, that leverages a recently-added Slurm feature. Slurm 20.11 introduced a new“interactive step”, designed to be used with salloc to automatically launch a terminal on an allocated compute
Improvement
Scheduler

Job #1

by Kilian Cavalotti
If you've been submitting jobs on Sherlock over the last couple days, you probably noticed something different about your your job ids... They lost a couple digits! If you submitted a job last week, its job id was likely in the 67,000...
Event
Scheduler

More (and easier!) GPU scheduling options

by Kilian Cavalotti
New
Scheduler
Improvement
GPU scheduling is now easier and more powerful on Sherlock, with the addition of new job submission options especially targeted at GPU workloads. The most visible change is that you can now use the --gpus option when submitting jobs...

Next scheduled maintenance: Oct. 16

by Kilian Cavalotti
In order to prepare future improvements of the parallel /scratch file system, as well as performing some required work on the scheduler, Sherlock will not be available during the following times: Wednesday, October 16th, 2019 - from 8...
Maintenance

A better view at Sherlock's resources

by Kilian Cavalotti
Scheduler
Improvement
New
How many jobs are running? What partitions do I have access to? How many CPUs can I use? Where should I submit my jobs? Any of those sound familiar? We know it's not always easy to navigate the native scheduler tools, their syntax, and...