Table of Contents

Running through a Scheduler

The code is usually run on large parallel machines, often PC clusters, most of which use schedulers, i.e., queuing or batch management systems to manage the running of jobs from a large number of users. The following considerations need to be taken into account when running on a system that uses a scheduler:

  • The processors/nodes to be used for each run are assigned dynamically by the scheduler, based on availability. Therefore, in order for the xgenerate_databases and the xspecfem3D executables (or between successive runs of the solver) to have access to the same database files (if they are stored on hard drives local to the nodes on which the code is run), they must be launched in sequence as a single job.

  • On some systems, the nodes to which running jobs are assigned are not configured for compilation. It may therefore be necessary to pre-compile both the xgenerate_databases and the xspecfem3D executables.

  • One feature of schedulers/queuing systems is that they allow submission of multiple jobs in a “launch and forget” mode. In order to take advantage of this property, care needs to be taken that output and intermediate files from separate jobs do not overwrite each other, or otherwise interfere with other running jobs.

Examples of job scripts can be found in the utils/scripts/Cluster/ directory and can straightforwardly be modified and adapted to meet more specific running needs.


This documentation has been automatically generated by pandoc based on the User manual (LaTeX version) in folder doc/USER_MANUAL/ (Dec 20, 2023)