2026.01.17
Below I present to you some proverbs and their SLURM analogues, with some creative liberties taken. I wrote these while waiting on my SLURM jobs to start.
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." A training run of a thousand epochs begins with a single sbatch. Submit the job. The queue will do the rest.
"He who knows patience knows peace." He who has watched a job sit at PENDING for three days knows patience. Peace comes when you stop refreshing squeue.
"The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now." The best time to test your code was before you submitted it. The second best time is after it fails. Either way, you plant the tree.
"Fall down seven times, stand up eight." FAILED seven times, sbatch eight. The log file is not a judgment. It is a teacher.
"Do not fear going slowly; fear only standing still." Do not fear a long queue time; fear only NODE_FAIL. Progress is progress, even when it is waiting.
"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back." To know why your job failed, ask the person in lab who failed the same way last week. They will tell you. There is no shame in this.
"A wise man learns from his mistakes." A wise researcher reads the error log. A foolish one changes nothing and resubmits. Both will learn. One will have allocation left.
"When the winds of change blow, some build walls. Others build windmills." When the cluster goes down for maintenance, some rage. Others finally write their paper.
Perhaps the ancients were not speaking of rivers and mountains and family and society. Perhaps they too were just trying to train a model before the 490 B.C. NeurIPS deadline. We'll never know. Their logs have been lost to time.