How to Submit Jobs in Flux

Do you want to submit a job to Flux? Here’s a short tutorial on how to do so!

Submit Jobs Using Flux’s CLI

From within a Flux instance, you can submit your job on the command line with optional arguments, resource options, per task options, and per resource options:

$ flux submit --nodes=2 --ntasks=4 --cores-per-task=2 ./my_compute_script.py 120
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$ flux submit --nodes=1 --ntasks=1 --cores-per-task=2 ./my_other_script.py 120
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In the above example, we are submitting two jobs with two different sets of options to describe how we want our jobs to run. In the first submission, we are asking for our job to start 4 tasks across 2 nodes, with 2 cores allocated for each task. In the second submission, we are asking for our job to start 1 task on just one node with 2 cores allocated for the task.

There are many different options to customize your job submission. For further details, please see flux-submit(1).

A jobid (e.g., ƒSUEFPDH) is returned for every job submitted. You can view the status of your running jobs with flux jobs:

$ flux jobs
   JOBID  USER     NAME       ST NTASKS NNODES     TIME INFO
ƒSUEFPDH  fluxuser my_other_s  R      1      1   1.842s
ƒM5k8m7m  fluxuser my_compute  R      4      2   3.255s

If you wish to see the stdout/stderr of a submitted job, see flux-job(1) for information on flux job attach.

Interactively Run a Job

If you wish to run a job interactively, e.g. see standard output as it runs, you can use the flux run command. It is identical to flux submit except it will handle stdio and it will block until the job has finished. For example:

$ flux run bash -c "echo start; sleep 5; echo done"
start
done

In the above example, we run a small bash script that will output “start”, sleep for 5 seconds, and then echo “done”. Unlike flux submit, you’ll notice it does not output a jobid. If we check for the status of this job with flux jobs after it has run, you will not find the job listed because it is no longer running. Instead run flux jobs -a which will list all jobs, including completed jobs.

$ flux jobs -a
   JOBID USER     NAME       ST NTASKS NNODES     TIME INFO
f2HnvmZy achu     bash       CD      1      1   5.119s catalyst159

You will see that job is in the “CD” state or “Completed” state.

And that’s it! If you have any questions, please let us know.

More Examples of Submitting Flux Jobs

$ flux submit --nodes=2 --queue=foo --job-name=my_special_job ./my_job.py

This submits a job to the foo queue across two nodes, and sets a custom name to the job.

$ flux submit --dry-run ./my_cool_job.py

If you don’t want your job to actually run, but you are interested in looking at the jobspec for your job, include the --dry-run option when you submit your job.

$ flux submit --output=job-{{id}}.out ./my_super_cool_job.py
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If you want to bypass the KVS and specify a filename for STDOUT redirection, include the --output option when submitting your job. You can format the name of your output file using the jobID via mustache template. In the example above, any output to STDOUT will be redirected to a file named job-ƒ3D78hc3q.out.


Last update: Mar 04, 2024