Skip to content

Docs CSC now features an automatic Finnish translation. Click here for more information.

Warning!

Puhti and Mahti are being decommissioned in stages, and their storage areas will become fully unavailable from 15 October 2026. Clean up unnecessary files and move any data you need to keep by 31 August 2026. See the Roihu data migration guide for instructions on transferring your data to Roihu.

Puhti scratch is very full: keep only active data there and move or delete everything else. No new Puhti scratch quota will be granted.

Available batch job partitions

On CSC supercomputers, programs are run by submitting them to partitions, which are logical sets of nodes managed by the Slurm workload manager. This page lists the available Slurm partitions on the Roihu, Puhti, and Mahti supercomputers and explains their intended uses. Below are the general guidelines for using the Slurm partitions on our systems:

  1. Use the test and gputest partitions for testing your code, not production. These partitions provide access to fewer resources than other partitions, but jobs submitted to them have a higher priority and are thus granted resources before other jobs.
  2. Only request multiple CPU cores if you know your program supports parallel processing. Reserving multiple cores does not automatically speed up your job. Your program must be written in a way that the computations can be performed in multiple threads or processes. Reserving more cores does nothing by itself if your code is not parallelized, except making you queue for longer.
  3. Only use the GPU partitions if you know your program can utilize GPUs. Running your computations using one or more GPUs is a very effective parallelization method for certain applications, but your program must be configured to use the CUDA platform. If you are unsure whether this is the case, it is better to submit your job to a CPU partition, since you will be allocated resources sooner. If unsure, contact the CSC Service Desk.

The following commands can be used to show information about available partitions:

# Display a summary of available partitions
sinfo --summarize
# Display details about a specific partition:
scontrol show partition <partition_name>

LUMI partitions

The available LUMI batch job partitions are found in the LUMI documentation.

Roihu partitions

Roihu partitions use different allocation types that cater to varying use cases and resource requirements. These are explained in the table below.

Allocation type Resource request
R Memory and CPU resources can be changed independently
N Full-node requests only
C Memory allocation is fixed based on the requested number of CPU cores
G CPU and memory allocation is fixed based on the requested number of GPUs

Roihu CPU partitions

Roihu provides the following partitions for submitting jobs to CPU nodes:

Partition Allocation type Time limit Nodes Max CPUs Node types Max memory Requirements
test R 15 minutes 1 - 2 384 per node M 744 GiB per node
small R 72 hours 1 384 per job M, L 1500 GiB per job
medium N 36 hours 1 - 6 384 per node M 744 GiB per node
large N 36 hours 6 - 60 384 per node M 744 GiB per node scalability test
longrun R 10 days 1 192 per job M, L 1500 GiB per job
hugemem C 36 hours 1 128 per job XL 6037 GiB per job
hugemem_longrun C 10 days 1 128 per job XL 6037 GiB per job

Roihu GPU partitions

Roihu provides the following partitions for submitting jobs to GPU nodes:

Partition Allocation type Time limit Nodes Max GPUs Node types Max memory Requirements
gputest G 15 minutes 1 - 2 4 per node GPU 217 GiB per reserved GPU
gpumedium G 36 hours 1 4 per job GPU 217 GiB per reserved GPU
gpularge G 36 hours 1 - 10 4 per node GPU 217 GiB per reserved GPU scalability test

Each full GPU node has 4 GH200 GPUs. Each reserved GPU grants access to up to 72 CPU cores, and 95 GiB of HBM3 memory + 122 GiB of LPDDR5 memory, for a total of 217G available memory per reserved GPU.

The memory amounts listed here are the allocatable amounts available to jobs; some memory is reserved for system use.

Roihu interactive partitions

Roihu has several partitions reserved for interactive use and for data visualization.

Roihu-CPU interactive use

The interactive partition on Roihu allows running interactive jobs on CPU nodes, through the sinteractive command.

The sinteractive command selects the correct partition based on your resource request and automatically provides Roihu-CPU resources when run from a Roihu-CPU login node.

Partition Allocation type Time limit Nodes Max CPUs Node types Max memory
interactive R 36 hours 1 32 per job M 64 GiB per job

Roihu-GPU interactive use

The gpuinteractive partition on Roihu allows running interactive jobs on GPU nodes, through the sinteractive command.

The sinteractive command selects the correct partition based on your resource request and automatically provides a GPU slice when run from a Roihu-GPU login node.

Partition Allocation type Time limit Nodes Max CPUs Max GPU slices Node types
gpuinteractive G 12 hours 1 TBA TBA GPU (slice)

What is a GPU slice?

The Roihu gpuinteractive partition uses GH200 superchips divided into 48 smaller slices. Each slice has one-seventh of the compute capacity and one-eighth of the GPU memory capacity (12 GiB) of a full GH200 superchip.

GPU slices not yet fully configured

GPU slices are not yet configured on the system, and reserving GPUs through sinteractive, or through Slurm on the partition will instead provide full GPUs.

Vizinteractive

Roihu also features the following partition for interactive use and data visualization with specialized hardware:

Partition Allocation type Time limit Nodes Max GPUs Node types
vizinteractive G 12 hours 1 2 per job V

Each node in the partition has 2 Nvidia L40 GPUs with 44 GiB of memory and a 64-core AMD EPYC 9335 CPU. Each reserved GPU grants access to up to 32 CPU cores and 183 GiB of CPU memory.

Local storage on Roihu nodes

Local storage on Roihu M, L, and GPU nodes is meant for storing temporary files only, not high-performance I/O.

High-performance local storage is available on Roihu XL and V nodes, which is ideal for I/O-intensive jobs.

The amount of local storage available to a single user depends on the partition used:

Allocation type Quota per user Read / Write speeds
R (shared nodes) 20 GiB 5000 / 1400 MB/s
N (full nodes) 600 GiB 5000 / 1400 MB/s
G (GPU nodes) 150 GiB 5000 / 1400 MB/s
Hugemem (XL) nodes 1.6 TiB 6700 / 4000 MB/s
VIZ nodes 6.5 TiB 6700 / 4000 MB/s

Read more about: Local storage on Roihu nodes

Puhti partitions

The following guidelines apply to the Slurm partitions on Puhti:

  1. Only request the memory you need. Memory can easily end up being a bottleneck in resource allocation. Even if the desired amount of GPUs and/or CPU cores is continuously available, your job will sit in the queue for as long as it takes for the requested amount of memory to become free. It is thus recommended to only request the amount of memory that is necessary for running your job. Additionally, the amount of CPU/GPU Billing Units consumed by your job is affected by the amount of memory requested, not the amount which was actually used. See how to estimate your memory requirements.
  2. Only use the longrun partitions if necessary. The longrun and hugemem_longrun partitions provide access to fewer resources and have a lower priority than the other partitions, so it is recommended to use them only for jobs that really require a very long runtime (e.g. if there is no way to checkpoint and restart a computation).

Puhti CPU partitions

Puhti features the following partitions for submitting jobs to CPU nodes:

Partition Time
limit
Max CPU
cores
Max
nodes
Node types Max memory
per node
Max local storage
(NVMe) per node
test 15 minutes 80 2 M 185 GiB n/a
small 3 days 40 1 M, L, IO 373 GiB 3600 GiB
large 3 days 1040 26 M, L, IO 373 GiB 3600 GiB
longrun 14 days 40 1 M, L, IO 373 GiB 3600 GiB
hugemem 3 days 160 4 XL, BM 1496 GiB 1490 GiB (XL), 5960 GiB (BM)
hugemem_longrun 14 days 40 1 XL, BM 1496 GiB 1490 GiB (XL), 5960 GiB (BM)

Puhti GPU partitions

Puhti features the following partitions for submitting jobs to GPU nodes:

Partition Time
limit
Max
GPUs
Max CPU
cores
Max
nodes
Node types Max memory
per node
Max local storage
(NVMe) per node
gputest 15 minutes 8 80 2 GPU 373 GiB 3600 GiB
gpu 3 days 80 800 20 GPU 373 GiB 3600 GiB

Fair use of GPU nodes on Puhti

You should reserve no more than 10 CPU cores per GPU.

Puhti interactive partition

The interactive partition on Puhti allows running interactive jobs on CPU nodes. To run an interactive job on a GPU node, use sinteractive command with the -g option, which submits the job to the gpu partition instead. Note that you can only run two simultaneous jobs on the Puhti interactive partition.

Partition Time
limit
Max CPU
cores
Max
nodes
Node types Max memory
per node
Max local storage
(NVMe) per node
interactive 7 days 8 1 IO 76 GiB 720 GiB

Mahti partitions

Mahti CPU partitions with node-based allocation

Mahti features the following partitions for submitting jobs to CPU nodes. Jobs submitted to these partitions occupy all of the resources available on a node and make it inaccessible to other jobs. Thus, your job should ideally be able to utilize all 128 cores available on each reserved node efficiently. Although in certain situations it may be worthwhile to undersubscribe nodes, note that your job will still consume CPU Billing Units based on the amount of reserved nodes, not CPU cores.

Some partitions are only available under special conditions. The large partition is only accessible to projects that have completed a scalability test and demonstrated good utilization of the partition resources. The gc partition, which allows users to run extremely large simulations, is only accessible to Grand Challenge projects.

Partition Time
limit
CPU cores
per node
Nodes
per job
Node types Memory
per node
Max local storage
(NVMe) per node
Requirements
test 1 hour 128 1–2 CPU 256 GiB n/a n/a
medium 36 hours 128 1–20 CPU 256 GiB n/a n/a
large 36 hours 128 20–200 CPU 256 GiB n/a scalability test
gc 36 hours 128 200–700 CPU 256 GiB n/a Grand Challenge project

Mahti CPU partitions with core-based allocation

Two CPU partitions on Mahti allow you to reserve cores instead of full nodes. These are the small partition and the interactive partition. In these partitions, jobs are allocated 1.875 GiB of memory for each reserved CPU core, and the only way to reserve more memory is to reserve more cores. These partitions are also special in that you can reserve local storage on the node. It is important that you only request local storage if you are able to make use of it, and no more than you need. Since the local storage is limited, requesting a large amount of storage may increase your queueing time.

The interactive partition on Mahti is intended for interactive pre- and post-processing tasks. It allows reserving CPU resources without occupying an entire node, which means that other jobs may also access the same node. You can run up to 8 simultaneous jobs on the interactive partition and reserve at most 32 cores, i.e., you may have one job using 32 cores, 8 jobs using 4 cores each, or anything in between.

The small partition is intended for batch processing of small scale CPU compute workloads, that do not need a full node. It is also able to support applications that need local storage to perform optimally. Many workloads that have traditionally used Puhti may benefit from this partition.

Partition Time
limit
Max CPU
cores
Max
nodes
Node types Max memory
per node
Max local storage
(NVMe) per node
small 3 days 128 1 CPU with NVMe 240 GiB 3500 GiB
interactive 7 days 32 1 CPU, CPU with NVMe 60 GiB 3500 GiB

Mahti GPU partitions

Mahti features the following partitions for submitting jobs to GPU nodes. Unless otherwise specified, the job is allocated 122.5 GiB of memory for each reserved GPU.

Partition Time
limit
Max
GPUs
Max CPU
cores
Max
nodes
Node types Max memory
per node
Max local storage
(NVMe) per node
gputest 15 minutes 4 128 1 GPU 490 GiB 3500 GiB
gpusmall 36 hours 2 64 1 GPU 490 GiB 3500 GiB
gpumedium 36 hours 24 768 6 GPU 490 GiB 3500 GiB

Fair use of GPU nodes on Mahti

You should reserve no more than 32 CPU cores per GPU.

Mahti GPU slices

A subset of the Nvidia A100 GPUs on the Mahti gpusmall partition are divided into a total of 28 smaller GPU slices, which have one-seventh of the compute and memory capacity of a full A100 GPU. You are able to reserve at most 4 CPU cores when using a GPU slice. Additionally, the job is allocated 17.5 GiB of memory, and there is no way to request a different amount. Finally, you are only able to reserve one GPU slice per job. The GPU slices are intended especially for interactive use that requires GPU capacity.

To reserve a GPU slice, use sinteractive with the -g option, or include the --gres=gpu:a100_1g.5gb:1 option together with specifying the gpusmall partition in your batch script. For more information, see the instructions on creating GPU batch jobs on Mahti.