Slurm-Dash

A lightweight, hybrid local/remote Slurm job tracking system with a Terminal User Interface (TUI). Monitor jobs submitted on remote HPC clusters from your local machine — no constant SSH, no squeue polling by hand.

How It Works

Slurm-Dash uses a three-layer architecture:

1. Remote wrapper: slurm-dash add deploys a standalone sbatch wrapper script to ~/.slurm_tracker/bin/sbatch on the remote and prepends that directory to PATH in ~/.bashrc and ~/.zshrc. Because it is a real script on PATH (not a shell function), it intercepts sbatch calls from interactive shells, bash scripts, Python subprocesses, and workflow managers like Nextflow and Snakemake alike.

2. Snapshot & capture: Every sbatch call triggers an instant snapshot of the working directory (reflink or hardlink — no byte copies) into a staging area, then asynchronously runs ~/.slurm_tracker/capture.py to record the job ID, submit arguments, git state, environment, and snapshot into a remote SQLite database at ~/.slurm_tracker/.slurm_tracker.db.

3. Local sync & live polling: Your local machine syncs the remote SQLite database into a local one on demand. When the TUI is open, it polls squeue and sacct over SSH to overlay live status (pending, running, completed, CPU/memory/GPU) onto the tracked jobs.

Installation

Download the prebuilt binary for your OS and architecture:

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/haaaaron/slurm-dash/main/install.sh | bash -s

This detects your OS and architecture, downloads the appropriate binary from the latest GitHub release, and installs it to ~/.local/bin/slurm-dash.

To install the latest nightly build instead:

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/haaaaron/slurm-dash/main/install.sh | bash -s nightly

After install, make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"   # add to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc

Supported platforms:

• Linux (x86_64, aarch64) — fully static musl binaries
• macOS (x86_64, ARM64)
• Windows (x86_64)

Uninstall

To uninstall:

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/haaaaron/slurm-dash/main/uninstall.sh | bash -s

This stops the daemon, removes the binary, and optionally removes local configuration and database.

Setup

Initialize a config template:

slurm-dash init-config

Edit ~/.config/slurm-dash/config.toml and add your cluster(s):

[servers.mycluster]
ssh_string = "user@hpc.cluster.edu"

Or use the one-shot add command:

slurm-dash add user@hpc.cluster.edu --alias mycluster

Either way, slurm-dash will auto-install the sbatch interceptor on first startup.

Usage

Start the daemon and open the web UI:

slurm-dash

(This spawns a background daemon on first run, then opens your browser to http://localhost:8765.)

Other commands:

slurm-dash serve --port 9000     # foreground mode (e.g., for systemd)
slurm-dash list                  # list configured clusters
slurm-dash status                # check if daemon is running
slurm-dash stop                  # stop the background daemon
slurm-dash add <ssh> --alias <name>     # add a new cluster
slurm-dash remove <alias> --yes  # remove a cluster
slurm-dash remove <alias> --purge-local --yes  # also delete local job records

Uninstallation

slurm-dash stop                         # stop the daemon
slurm-dash remove <alias> --yes         # remove a cluster
rm ~/.local/bin/slurm-dash              # delete the binary