https://www.osc.edu/documentation/knowledge_base/out_of_memory_oom_or_excessive_memory_usage
Problem description
A common problem on our systems is that a user's job causes a node out of memory or uses more than its allocated memory if the node is shared with other jobs.

If a job exhausts both the physical memory and the swap space on a node, it causes the node to crash. With a parallel job, there may be many nodes that crash. When a node crashes, the OSC staff has to manually reboot and clean up the node. If other jobs were running on the same node, the users have to be notified that their jobs failed.

If your job requests less than a full node, for example, --ntasks-per-node=4, it may be scheduled on a node with other running jobs. In this case, your job is entitled to a memory allocation proportional to the number of cores requested. For example, if a system has 4.5 GB per core and you request one core, it is your responsibility to make sure your job uses no more than 4.5 GB. Otherwise your job will interfere with the execution of other jobs.

Example errors

OOM in a parallel program launched through srun

slurmstepd: error: Detected 1 oom-kill event(s) in StepId=14604003.0 cgroup. Some of your processes may have been killed by the cgroup out-of-memory handler.

srun: error: o0616: task 0: Out Of Memory

OOM in program run directly by the batch script of a job

slurmstepd: error: Detected 1 oom-kill event(s) in StepId=14604003.batch cgroup. Some of your processes may have been killed by the cgroup out-of-memory handler.

Suggested solutions

Here are some suggestions for fixing jobs that use too much memory. Feel free to contact OSC Helpfor assistance with any of these options.

Some of these remedies involve requesting more processors (cores) for your job. As a general rule, we require you to request a number of processors proportional to the amount of memory you require. You need to think in terms of using some fraction of a node rather than treating processors and memory separately. If some of the processors remain idle, that’s not a problem. Memory is just as valuable a resource as processors.