Converting PBS/Torque options to Slurm

This is preliminary documentation for the pilot users. It will be further refined as the pilot progresses.

See also the Slurm Rosetta Stone of Workload Managers (PDF document).

Common tasks in Torque/Moab and Slurm

Task	Torque/Moab	Slurm equivalent
Submit a job	qsub	sbatch
Cancel a job	qdel	scancel
List jobs in the queue	qstat, showq	squeue

#PBS / qsub command line options

When specified in a Torque job script, the line specifying the option should start with #PBS. In Slurm, such lines start with #SBATCH.

PBS/Torque	Slurm equivalent
-L tasks=<X>:lprocs=<Y>	--ntasks=<X> --cpus-per-task=<Y>
-l walltime=<time>	-t <time>, --time=<time>
-N <jobname>	-J <jobname>, --job-name=<jobname>
-o <file>	-o <file template>, --output=<file template>
-e <file>	-e <file template>, --error=<file template>, default is sending stderr to stdout
-m abe	--mail-type=FAIL,BEGIN,END
-M <mailaddress>	--mail-user=<mailaddress>
-v <variable list>	--export=<variable list>

Environment variables

PBS variable	Slurm variable
PBS_JOBID	SLURM_JOB_ID SLURM_JOBID (for backward compatibility)
PBS_JOBNAME	SLURM_JOB_NAME %j in filename templates
PBS_NODENUM
PBS_NODEFILE	Replaced by a variable specifying the nodes rather than a node file: SLURM_JOB_NODELIST, SLURM_NODELIST (for backward compatibility)
PBS_NUM_NODES	SLURM_JOB_NUM_NODES SLURM_NNODES (for backward compatibility)
PBS_NUM_PPN
PBS_NP
PBS_O_WORKDIR	SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR Slurm executes the job in the directory from which the job was submitted (unless otherwise specified) rather than the home dir.
PBS_WALLTIME	No equivalent.