How To

At the bottom of this page are links to pages to aid your transition to Slurm or Swif version 2, depending on your workflow needs. 

History

Auger was developed by Jefferson Lab more than 10 years ago when there were several competing batch software systems none of which provided all the features needed for experimental physics computing. Auger hides the complexities of the underlying batch system and adds necessary features needed for Jefferson Lab. Similarly, SWIF1 was developed on top of the Auger to handle large data analysis workflows that consist of many Auger jobs with job dependency. Moreover, SWIF1 provides more capabilities such as staging input/output files from the tape library and automatic retry of failed jobs.   Since the inception of Auger,  it has served Jefferson Lab computing community very well and has been evolved several times utilizing several underlying batch systems such as LSF, PBS and currently Slurm. Unfortunately, Auger was invented to handle batch jobs targeting single node CPU jobs with an ability of staging files in and out of the tape library. With ever increasing demands on GPU computing and multi-node CPU computing, Auger cannot provide the capabilities of handling these type of jobs without major software overhaul. Fortunately, Slurm has been a de facto standard batch system for super-computing sites and computing clusters for the past 10 years and it provides an incredible number of features that are not available in Auger such as GPU, MPI, Thread CPU binding, array of jobs and so on. Therefore, Slurm is the standard Jefferson Lab batch system and Auger, thus SWIF1, will be decommissioned in the near future. For those who seek a simple way to handle large data analysis workflow without worrying about staging files from the tape library, SWIF2, which offers almost identidical command line interface as SWIF1, is the standard Jefferson Lab workflow software system. Please check out Jefferson Lab Slurm Guide  and SWIF2 documents to start submitting jobs. The following documents provide instructions on how to move from Auger to either Slurm or SWIF2 along with quick guide for moving from SWIF1 to SWIF2.

Timeline

• Tuesday, January 4th, 2022 the these commands, jsub, jkill, jobinfo, swif1, swif will be deprecated and issue a warning.
• Tuesday, February 8th, 2022 jobs submitted using Auger or swif1 will have reduced scheduling capacity to encourage transition to Slurm and swif2.  
• At some point the deprecated commands will be removed, Auger and SWIF1 services will be shut down, and documentation will be removed. The swif command will become an alias for swif2. 

For further questions on Slurm, swif2, or the schedule, please submit a request to ServiceNow or by emailing helpdesk@jlab.org