On Big Red at IU, how do I use the serialjob script to submit jobs?

A serialjob script provides a convenient method for submitting serial (single-processor) programs to the LoadLeveler batching and queuing system. (If your program will take more than 20 minutes to run, you need to use this system.) For complete documentation, enter man serialjob on Big Red.

On this page:

• Accessing serialjob
• serialjob options
• Processor and wall-time limits
• Using serialjob
• Limits of serialjob

Accessing serialjob

serialjob should be on your path by default, and its manual page (the best source of information about serialjob) should be on your MANPATH by default.

serialjob options

When you submit a job with serialjob, you may specify how long the job should be allowed to run, and the queue to which the job should be submitted. The default is to launch one process for up to two hours in the LONG queue on Big Red. The general form of the command is:

Items in brackets are optional. Replace the example text above as follows:

• For program, substitute the name of the program to submit.
• For program-options, substitute the command-line options you want to pass to the program.
• -- is required to separate the program options from the other options.
• For wallclocklimit, use the hh:mm:ss format to specify the number of hours that the job should be allowed to run. The default is two hours.
• For notify, you can choose to get email when the job starts, completes, or has errors. By default, no email is sent. Possible values to this option are always, never, complete, start, and error.
• If you are a TeraGrid user, you must specify a project (allocation) id using the -project option.
• For memory, replace the x with an integer to specify how much memory will be consumed during running time.

Processor and wall-time limits

In the default queue (LONG), you can request up to 32 nodes (128 processors) for up to 336 hours (14 days). In the NORMAL queue, you can request up to 1,024 processes for up to 48 hours (2 days). The DEBUG queue is available for debugging, and it allows up to 16 processes for up to 15 minutes. For more about the intended uses and characteristics of the batch queues, see Big Red usage policies.

Using serialjob

For example, suppose you've written a program called speedster that takes options that specify speed and the name of the file to be processed. To run the program for up to two hours in the LONG queue, you would enter:

To run for up to 72 hours, you would enter:

To run for 10 hours and request 3GB of memory, you would enter:

If the program that you wish to run is not in your default path, be sure to use the fully qualified path name of the program. When your job runs, the current working directory of your program is the directory from which you ran the serialjob command.

Limits of serialjob

• The serialjob script works only for serial applications.
• serialjob will not work for programs that use a -- (double-dash) argument, because serialjob uses that argument to separate options to your program from options to LoadLeveler.
• If you need to quote arguments, serialjob handles only double quotes. It cannot provide the protection usually afforded by single quotes because the Bourne shell provides no mechanism for escaping characters within strings in single quotes. Thus, serialjob treats single quotes as double quotes.

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