Running large memory jobs on the HEC

The job scheduler cannot predict how much memory your jobs will consume, so it is important for you to declare the amount required when submitting a job. Specifying the correct amount means that the scheduler can ensure that jobs are sent to a compute node with enough memory to support them. By default, jobs are assigned a memory resource request of 500M. Jobs over 500M in size are classed as large memory jobs and must specify their memory requirements.

It’s important to declare memory usage as accurately as possible - the job scheduler reserves that memory for you whether you use it or not, so specifying more memory than you need quickly leads to memory starvation across the cluster, limiting other users from running their jobs. Bear in mind that in order to guard against jobs with run-away memory leaks which might adversely affect other users the scheduler will terminate any job which exceeds its requested memory requirement.

Specifying a job’s memory resource requirement is a delicate balance - enough to enable the job to run, but not so much higher than is geniunely needed in order to avoid wasting resource. If you’re uncertain how much memory a new type of job requires, we recommend submitting a single job with a very large memory requirement, then using the monitoring tools (e.g. seff) to find the actual memory requirements once it has completed so that you can specify a more accurate memory resource requests for future jobs.

Adding memory resource requests to jobs

For jobs greater than 500 megabytes, calculate the amount of memory your job requires as closely as possible and submit the job with:

sbatch --mem=X myjob.com

Where X is the amount memory to be reserved along with the unit - either M (megabytes) or G (gigabytes). E.g. 700M means 700 megabytes, 2G means 2 gigabytes. Note that the numeric value must be an integer, so if you need, e.g., 1.5G then you need to specify 1500M.

Alternatively, you can add a similar directive into the job script by adding the line:

#SBATCH --mem=2G