Quick Start Guide

From zero to your first job in ~30 minutes

SeaWulf is available to the campus community and external collaborators, including Brookhaven National Laboratory personnel and New York State companies and agencies. Access is project-based: projects are established by Stony Brook faculty and staff, and individual accounts are authorized under them — see requesting accounts.

1 · Connect

Open OnDemand (recommended for beginners) gives a browser GUI — see the overview. Or connect by SSH:

# For general computing (Rocky Linux 9.6)
ssh -X SBU_NETID@milan.seawulf.stonybrook.edu

# For legacy applications (CentOS 7)
ssh -X SBU_NETID@login.seawulf.stonybrook.edu

Both require DUO authentication. Windows users: consider MobaXterm.

2 · Know the architecture

• login.seawulf.stonybrook.edu (login1/login2) — older Intel Haswell nodes and legacy GPU nodes
• milan.seawulf.stonybrook.edu (milan1/milan2) — Intel Skylake (40-core), AMD EPYC Milan (96-core), and Sapphire Rapids (HBM) nodes for most workloads

3 · Load software with modules

module avail
module load slurm
module load gcc/12.3.0
module list

4 · Your first job

1. Prepare a workspace.

   mkdir ~/my_first_job && cd ~/my_first_job
   module load slurm

2. Create hello.slurm.

   #!/bin/bash
   #SBATCH --job-name=hello_world
   #SBATCH --partition=short-40core-shared
   #SBATCH --nodes=1
   #SBATCH --ntasks=1
   #SBATCH --mem=1G
   #SBATCH --time=00:05:00
   #SBATCH --output=hello_%j.out
   #SBATCH --error=hello_%j.err
   
   echo "Hello from SeaWulf!"
   echo "Job ID: $SLURM_JOB_ID"
   echo "Running on node: $(hostname)"
   echo "Date and time: $(date)"

3. Submit it.

   sbatch hello.slurm

   Returns something like Submitted batch job 12345.

4. Monitor and view output.

   squeue -u $USER
   cat hello_12345.out

5 · Job states

Common issues

• Job won't start — confirm partition requirements, request fewer resources, or validate with sbatch --test-only script.slurm
• Connection problems — repeated failed attempts can trigger IP or DUO blocking; open a support ticket if it persists
• GUI won't launch — add the -X flag (see X11 forwarding)

Next: the job-script guide, the queue tables, and the cheat sheet.