NBI-Slurm: Simplified submission of Slurm jobs with energy saving mode
This tool addresses usability and energy efficiency for researchers using HPC clusters, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SLURM infrastructure.
The authors tackled the complexity of managing jobs on SLURM HPC clusters by developing NBI-Slurm, a Perl package that simplifies submission and includes an energy-saving mode, resulting in reduced cognitive overhead and potential carbon footprint reduction.
NBI-Slurm is a Perl package that provides a simplified, user-friendly interface for submitting and managing jobs on SLURM high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. It offers both a library of Perl modules for programmatic job management and a suite of command-line tools designed to reduce the cognitive overhead of SLURM's native interface. Distinctive features of NBI-Slurm are (a) TUI applications to view and cancel jobs, (b) the possibility to generate tool-specific wrappers for (bioinformatic) tools and (c) an energy-aware scheduling mode -- "eco mode" -- that automatically defers flexible jobs to off-peak periods, helping research institutions reduce their computational carbon footprint without requiring users to manually plan submission times.