slurmstepd

slurmstepd

slurmstepd is the Slurm job step manager daemon. It is automatically spawned by slurmd when a job step launches and terminates when the job step completes. The daemon should not be manually invoked by users or administrators.The daemon manages I/O streams (stdin, stdout, stderr) for job steps, tracks accounting information including CPU time, memory usage, and I/O statistics, and processes signals directed at job steps. Each job step within a multi-step job has its own slurmstepd process.

SIGINT, SIGTERM, SIGQUIT

Trigger graceful shutdown

Log connection manager status (debug level info or higher)

Explicitly ignored

Should never be manually started; it is spawned automatically by slurmd. Multiple slurmstepd processes may run simultaneously for multi-step jobs. Killing slurmstepd directly may leave job steps in inconsistent states; use scancel instead.

slurmstepd is part of Slurm (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management), developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory starting in 2002. The step daemon architecture allows efficient management of complex jobs with multiple steps, each with potentially different resource requirements. Slurm is maintained by SchedMD.

slurmd(8), srun(1), scancel(1), sstat(1)