Parallel Workers on High-Performance Compute Environments

Introduction

This vignettes illustrates how to launch parallel workers via job schedulers running in high-performance compute (HPC) environments.

Examples

Example: Launch parallel workers via the Grid Engine job scheduler

‘Grid Engine’ is a high-performance compute (HPC) job scheduler where one can request compute resources on multiple nodes, each running multiple cores. Examples of Grid Engine schedulers are Oracle Grid Engine (formerly Sun Grid Engine), Univa Grid Engine, and Son of Grid Engine - all commonly referred to as SGE schedulers. Each SGE cluster may have its own configuration with their own way of requesting parallel slots.

Consider the following two files: script.sh and script.R.

script.sh:

#! /usr/bin/env bash
#$ -cwd               ## Run in current working directory
#$ -j y               ## Merge stdout and stderr
#$ -l mem_free=100M   ## 100 MiB RAM per slot
#$ -l h_rt=00:10:00   ## 10 minutes runtime 
#$ -pe mpi 8          ## 8 compute slots

echo "Information on R:"
Rscript --version

echo "Running R script:"
Rscript script.R

script.R:

library(parallelly)
library(parallel)

cl <- makeClusterPSOCK(
  availableWorkers(),
  rshcmd = "qrsh", rshopts = c("-inherit", "-nostdin", "-V")
)
print(cl)

# Perform calculations in parallel
X <- 1:100
y <- parLapply(cl = cl, X, fun = sqrt)
y <- unlist(y)
z <- sum(y)
print(z)

stopCluster(cl)

The script.sh file is a job script that we submit to the scheduler that runs the R script script.R when launched. If we submit script.sh as:

$ qsub script.sh

it will by default request eight slots - on one more more machines, which then R and parallelly will set up a parallel cluster on. On how many, and on which machines, the parallel workers will run on depends on where the job scheduler finds these requested slots on.

Here is the output from one such run, where the scheduler happened to allot the slots across three machines:

Information on R:
Rscript (R) version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31)
Running R script:
Socket cluster with 8 nodes where 4 nodes are on host ‘localhost’
(R version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31), platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), 3
nodes are on host ‘qb3-id130’ (R version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31), 
platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), 1 node is on host ‘qb3-as16’ (R 
version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31), platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
[1] 671.4629

Example: Launch parallel workers via the’Fujitsu Technical Computing Suite job scheduler

The ‘Fujitsu Technical Computing Suite’ is a high-performance compute (HPC) job scheduler where one can request compute resources on multiple nodes, each running multiple cores.