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The Blue Waters system uses TORQUE Resource Manager integrated with the Moab Workload Manager to schedule and manage user jobs. Since Torque is based on OpenPBS, most of the commands for managing your jobs on Blue Waters will be the same as PBS commands. 

The batch system works with the following components to start a job

  • Application launcher (aprun) utility launches applications on compute nodes (in case you're used to using mpirun on other systems to launch jobs, the aprun command takes its place on the Cray system). 
  • Application Level Placement Scheduler (ALPS) has applications submitted to it by aprun for placement and execution. 

The basic process to execute a job on Blue Waters is as follows:

  • Determine the resources needed for your job
  • Pick a queue that will provide the required resources
  • Create a job script that includes the aprun command and describes the resources needed for your job
  • Verify that your job is setup for checkpointing (at the application level) if running at scale or for long wall time
  • Submit the job script to the batch system using qsub
    • You can set the enviroment variable  'NOAPRUNWARN=1' in the job submission environment to suppress the message: "WARNING: A scan of your job script did not find an invocation of 'aprun'/'ccmrun'. This may be due to using another command to invoke 'aprun'/'ccmrun', or the use of a shell variable. Job will be submitted as usual, but please ensure your job script eventually invokes 'aprun'/'ccmrun' command to execute tasks on allocated compute nodes."

You can see the options for qsub by looking at the qsub man page.  To delete a job from the queue before it runs, or after it's begun running, use "qdel <jobid>".