🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the high cognitive burden on users and excessive carbon emissions associated with scientific computing due to the complexity of the SLURM job scheduler interface and its lack of energy-aware scheduling mechanisms. To mitigate these issues, the authors propose a modular Perl-based toolkit featuring a simplified command-line interface and a text-based user interface (TUI) that supports job monitoring, cancellation, and automatic generation of specialized submission scripts. A key innovation is the introduction of an “eco-mode” that enables automatic energy-efficient scheduling through off-peak workload shifting. This approach significantly lowers the usability barrier, enhances job management efficiency, and effectively reduces the carbon footprint of research computing workflows.
📝 Abstract
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.