Please be judicious in your use of the email option in sbatch

One commonly used feature on the JHPCE cluster is the “send me an email when my job completes” option in SLURM. This option can be enabled by adding the “–mail-type=FAIL,END –mail-user=john@jhu.edu” options to your qsub command.

$ sbatch --mail-type=FAIL,END --mail-user=john@jhu.edu script2

This option is very convenient for longer running jobs on the cluster. It allows one to submit their jobs, and let them run on the cluster without having to continually login to the cluster to check the status of your job.

This option though can cause problems when running thousands of jobs or tasks on the cluster. Most email servers employ heuristics to detect spam email, and the sudden appearance of thousands of email messages over a short period of time can trigger this. This may result in one’s email or domain account getting locked, or a nasty note from the email support team. When this happens, it may take time to unravel and restore access to one’s email account.

We do go over this during the JHPCE orientation, so this is a gentle reminder to be use caution when using the email option in qsub. The slides for the JHPCE orientation can be downloaded from the Orientation page https://jhpce.jhu.edu/register/orientation/ Please email us at bitsupport if you have any questions.

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