Frequently Asked Questions

These are some of the questions we get asked the most.

  • Why is my job taking forever to run?

Your job could be slow to run because of your fairshare. To check your fairshare you can do sshare -u $USER. If your fairshare is 0.000000 you have used the cluster more than your fair share and will be de-prioritized by the queuing software.

  • Why is my job not moving out of 'pending'?

If you see 'Priority' your job is waiting patiently in line for its turn to run. For other messages please see the section on Running Job Length in our document on Slurm.

  • I want to use a different shell, how do I do that?

The default user shell is Bash. To see the types of shells installed on the cluster do a chsh -l. This provides a list of shells installed on Lewis. To change type the shell you want to use and hit enter. Running echo $0 will show the shell you changed to. This does not change your default shell.

  • My job won't run in 2 days. Is there anyway I can get it to run longer?

If your job will not run in 2 days we will have you attempt to tune your job either via email or with a RSS team member. If that does not help reduce the run time of your job we can add you to the long QOS. The long QOS will allow your job to run for up to 7 days. You can check your QOS by sacctmgr show assoc user=$USER format=acc,user,qos.

  • I forgot my passphrase, what should I do?

If you forget your passphrase you will need to generate a new ssh-key pair and send us your new public key by email. If you need help generating your key please see our instructions.

  • A MATLAB module load shows: 'ERROR: You must request a license to run matlab'

MATLAB is a licensed software product and has limits on how many users can use it concurrently. Please read the Licensed Software and the MATLAB documents for full examples requesting the licenses you need to run.

  • Can I install software that I need in the cluster?

Yes, you can install software and packages you need in your user or group space. Please review Software Install Request page for more details.