Limit the number of running jobs in SLURM

Question

I am queuing multiple jobs in SLURM. Can I limit the number of parallel running jobs in slurm?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

According to SLURM documentation, --array=0-15%4 (- sign and not :) will limit the number of simultaneously running tasks from this job array to 4

I wrote test.sbatch:

#!/bin/bash
# test.sbatch
#
#SBATCH -J a
#SBATCH -p campus
#SBATCH -c 1
#SBATCH -o %A_%a.output

mkdir test${SLURM_ARRAY_TASK_ID}

# sleep for up to 10 minutes to see them running in squeue and 
# different times to check that the number of parallel jobs remain constant
RANGE=600; number=$RANDOM; let "number %= $RANGE"; echo "$number"

sleep $number

and run it with sbatch --array=1-15%4 test.sbatch

Jobs run as expected (always 4 in parallel) and just create directories and kept running for $number seconds.

Appreciate comments and suggestions.