Superdome quick start guide

The Superdome is a shared memory machine which is intended for applications requiring large amounts of RAM on a single host.

As Superdome is part of the Genius cluster, please also see the Tier-2 access page for general information on how to access Genius.

How to run a job on Superdome?

To submit jobs to Superdome from a Genius login node you need to select either the superdome or superdome_long Slurm partition, depending on whether your job needs less than 3 days or less than 7 days.

The CPU resources on Superdome are furthermore allocated on the basis of entire sockets and not on the basis of individual cores as on other partitions. Since the 112 cores in Superdome are grouped in 8 sockets (see the Superdome hardware page), this means that all Superdome jobs get access to a number of cores which is a multiple of 14.

The allocation for the following job will hence consist of an entire socket (and its 14 cores):

$ sbatch --account=lp_my_project --clusters=genius --partition=superdome \
         --ntasks=1 myscript.slurm

By default, each task will be launched on a separate socket. The following job will therefore get two sockets (and so 28 cores in total):

$ sbatch --account=lp_my_project --clusters=genius --partition=superdome \
         --ntasks=2 myscript.slurm

If you want to get multiple Slurm tasks per socket you will need to use the --ntasks-per-socket option, for example:

$ sbatch --account=lp_my_project --clusters=genius --partition=superdome \
         --ntasks=28 --ntasks-per-socket=14 myscript.slurm

Note

The maximum amount of memory per core for Superdome is 53.5 GB, which is also the default value. Your jobs will hence by default receive 749 GB of RAM per allocated socket.