Environments

An environment describes where and how work can be scheduled on a cluster: a Slurm partition or PBS queue, its wall-time limits, and the scheduling fields users fill in (such as account and QoS). Users pick an environment to get a compute node for a desktop, a VS Code session, or a worker, and ACTIVATE submits the scheduler job for them.

Environments are available on cloud clusters, managed clusters, and existing clusters that have a scheduler.

Viewing environments

Open a cluster and click the Environments tab. The table shows each environment's Name, Partition, Nodes (available out of total), Wall time (default, with the maximum in parentheses), Source, and Status.

Anyone who can see the cluster can view its environments. Users with login access to the cluster can schedule onto its active environments. Adding, editing, and deleting environments requires write access to the cluster.

Automatically detected environments

Connected clusters report their partitions to ACTIVATE, and ACTIVATE creates one environment per partition, with Source auto-detected. These stay in sync with the scheduler: node counts and wall-time limits update as the cluster reports them, and an environment whose partition disappears becomes inactive.

For many clusters, the detected environments are all you need. Edit one to add defaults or require an account (see Editing an environment).

Adding an environment

Add an environment yourself when you want a curated option, for example a "GPU visualization" choice with sensible defaults, on top of a partition.

1. On the Environments tab, click Add.

2. Fill in New environment:

   Field	Description
   Name	Required. Unique within the cluster.
   Partition or queue	Required. The Slurm partition or PBS queue jobs are submitted to.
   Scheduler	SLURM or PBS.
   Display name	Optional. What users see in pickers. Defaults to the name.
   Description	Optional. Shown under the name in the table.
   Default wall time	Optional. Used when a user doesn't set one. Use HH:MM:SS, or D-HH:MM:SS for multi-day limits.
   Maximum wall time	Optional. Users can't request more. Same format.
   Account is required to submit	Slurm only. Users must pick an account.
   QoS is required to submit	Slurm only. Users must pick a QoS.

   

3. Click Create. The environment reopens in edit mode so you can set its defaults.

Editing an environment

Click Edit on the environment's row. You can change the display name, description, wall times, required account and QoS, and Status (Active or Inactive). The name, partition, and scheduler can't be changed.

Expand Defaults and directives to set default values for the scheduling fields. Users see defaults as placeholders and can override them; fields left blank use the default.

Scheduling fields

These are the fields users can set when they schedule onto an environment. Desktop and VS Code sessions always request one node.

For example, to request a GPU on Slurm, set Scheduler directives to:

#SBATCH --gpus-per-node=1

Deleting an environment

Click Delete on a custom environment's row and confirm. Sessions and workers can no longer be scheduled with it. You can't delete an environment while workers are still using it; delete those workers first. Detected environments can't be deleted; set them to Inactive instead.

From the command line

pw environments ls --cluster my-cluster
pw environments create --cluster my-cluster --name gpu-viz --partition gpu --scheduler slurm --default-time 04:00:00
pw environments update gpu-viz --cluster my-cluster --default walltime=02:00:00

See pw environments for all commands.

Troubleshooting