Partitions on M3

The nodes in the M3 cluster are categorised into different partitions. Each partition has a particular set of characteristics. For example, the m3j partition contains nodes with very high memory, and the gpu partition contains nodes with access to GPUs.

When submitting a SLURM job request, you can specify a partition with --partition. For example, to request a node in the m3j partition, you would do:

sbatch --partition=m3j my-job.sh

The tables below indicate which partitions are available to every M3 user. You may notice other partitions also exist on M3, but access to these is restricted. If you don’t specify a partition, then it defaults to the comp partition.

Additionally, you may specify multiple partitions at once. This can be useful if you just want any GPU and don’t care what type it is, in which case you could do:

sbatch --partition=m3g,gpu --gres=gpu:1 my-job.sh

You may find the show_cluster command useful to see how busy each partition is at any given moment. This command will also help you understand the specifications of individual nodes where we have reported a partition as having “up to” some amount of resources.

Compute partitions

Name	Partition	Total nodes	Total cores	CPUs per node	Memory per node (GB)
High-Density CPUs	m3i	45	810	18	181
High-Density CPUs with High Memory	m3j	11	198	18	373
High-Density CPUs with Extra High Memory	m3m	1	18	18	948
Short Jobs	short	2	36	18	181
General Computation	comp	79	1864	Up to 96	Up to 1532

GPU partitions

Warning

You should never explicitly request the desktop partition, since it is reserved for use by STRUDEL desktops.

When you want a GPU, you must additionally specify the --gres parameter. This is done like so:

sbatch --partition=gpu --gres=gpu:1 my-job.sh
# Or if you want a specific kind of GPU
sbatch --partition=gpu --gres=gpu:A40:1 my-job.sh

Some more specific details about these partitions can be found in GPU Look-Up Tables.

GPU type	Partition	Total nodes	Total cores	CPUs per node	Memory per node (GB)	Total GPUs	GPUs per node
V100	m3g	19	342	18	Up to 373	56	Up to 3
A100,T4,A40	gpu	20	552	Up to 28	Up to 1020	52	Up to 8
P4,T4,A40	desktop	28	682	Up to 32	Up to 1020	158	Up to 8