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There are many reasons a job may fail. A good first step is to use the shist command to check the ExitCode SLURM gave it. The command follows this format: shist --starttime YYYY-MM-DD.

Here’s an example of the output for a job that failed immediately with an ExitCode of 1.

JobID         Partition        QOS    JobName      User      State    Elapsed   NNodes      NCPUS        NodeList ExitCode                 End 
------------ ---------- ---------- ---------- --------- ---------- ---------- -------- ---------- --------------- -------- -------------------
73088        priority-+ erm12009g+  submit_rx  jdt10005     FAILED   00:00:00        1         32           gtx21      1:0 2022-11-17T10:05:34 

The ExitCode of a job will be a number between 0 and 255. An ExitCode of 0 means that—as far as SLURM is concerned—the job ran and was completed properly. Any non-zero ExitCode will indicate that the job failed. One could then search the ExitCode on Google to investigate what SLURM thinks caused the job to fail. Sometimes this is helpful but not always. Either way, take note of what you find for future reference.

The next clue to investigate is the NodeList column. Sometimes a job fails because there is something wrong with the compute node our job was run on. If the compute node is the problem (and Storrs HPC staff haven’t fixed it already), the job should fail again with the same ExitCode. We can submit our job specifically to that same node to see if the job fails again. Try adding this to the #SBATCH header of your script to target a specific node. Here, we target gtx21 because that was the node listed in the NodeList column above.

#SBATCH --nodelist=gtx21

Once you see the job has failed multiple times on the same node, then you can feel confident that a faulty node is likely the cause. Please submit a help request to Storrs HPC including a screenshot from the shist output.

It is recommended to check the exit codes listed in the output above. The are listed here for reference:

0 → success

non-zero → failure

Exit code 1 indicates a general failure

Exit code 2 indicates incorrect use of shell builtins

Exit codes 3-124 indicate some error in job (check software exit codes)

Exit code 125 indicates out of memory

Exit code 126 indicates command cannot execute

Exit code 127 indicates command not found

Exit code 128 indicates invalid argument to exit

Exit codes 129-192 indicate jobs terminated by Linux signals

For these, subtract 128 from the number and match to signal code

Enter kill -l to list signal codes

Enter man signal for more information

When a signal was responsible for a job or step's termination, the signal number will be displayed after the exit code, delineated by a colon(:).