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October 2025

Checkpointing in a Preemptible Environment

What is Preemption?

In the context of computing, preemption refers to the act of stopping or pausing one process to allow another process to run, and we say that a task, X, preempts another task, Y, when X pauses Y to allow itself to run. We can use this concept of preemption in an HPC environment to maximize the utilization of the resources in the cluster by allowing low priority jobs to be preempted by higher priority jobs since this allows us to be lenient with the resource limitations placed on the low priority jobs.

  • in Software
  • 2 min read

Conda vs Anaconda

On RCAC community clusters we deploy modules for both conda and anaconda. These are both separate distributions of the "conda" package manager. The conda module points towards the Miniforge distribution of conda (https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge), while the anaconda module loads the official Anaconda, Inc. distribution of conda (https://www.anaconda.com/download).

Although these two distributions behave similarly, the components within them vary slightly:

  • in Slurm
  • 15 min read

About Slurm Fairshare on RCAC clusters

The purpose of this article is to provide a deep-dive into how Slurm assigns priority to the jobs it is scheduling. The design space for such a scheduler is very large and so there are many options that Slurm provides to accommodate a variety of different clusters/policies.

VS Code on RCAC Resources

Visual Studio Code (VS Code or Code) is a popular IDE growing in usage in HPC. It is particularly useful for less-technical researchers (relative to say, Vim), because of it's remote development capabilities.