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Hyperpod Slurm Debugger

AWS LabsOfficialPublished by AWS Labs

  • Skill
  • Review and audit
  • Cloud and DevOps
  • Apache-2.0
  • Low risk
  • Has scripts

From the author

Diagnostic-only skill for Slurm scheduler and node-daemon issues on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod Slurm clusters. Scope mirrors the HyperPod troubleshooting guide. Invoke when the user reports a Slurm node stuck in down/drain, "Node unexpectedly rebooted" after auto-repair, slurmd not running, jobs stuck PENDING with REASON=Resources while sinfo shows idle nodes, jobs stuck COMPLETING after node replacement, GRES/GPU counts wrong, scontrol ping failing, slurmctld unresponsive, an Action:Reboot/Replace request that did not trigger HyperPod auto-recovery, or auto-resume not restarting a job. Also triggers on "drain before reboot", "diagnose a Slurm node", "investigate stuck jobs."
— the description by AWS Labs

AutoGineer summary

Written by AutoGineer from the skill’s own files, not by the author

The HyperPod Slurm Debugger is a read-only diagnostic utility designed to investigate common issues in Slurm-based Amazon SageMaker HyperPod clusters. It provides a structured approach to identifying problems such as nodes stuck in down or drain states, unexpected reboots, controller desynchronization, and job failures. The skill strictly adheres to a read-only policy, ensuring no state-mutating commands are executed, recommended, or printed. Instead, it maps diagnostic findings to official AWS and Slurm documentation for user-led remediation.

What it does

  • Identifies Slurm node states and daemon health issues.
  • Diagnoses controller desyncs and job scheduling bottlenecks.
  • Validates Action:Reboot and Action:Replace strings for HyperPod auto-recovery.
  • Maps diagnostic findings to authoritative AWS and Slurm documentation.
  • Verifies cluster orchestration type to ensure compatibility.
  • Provides read-only analysis of cluster logs and node status.

When to use it

  • When Slurm nodes are stuck in down or drain states.
  • When jobs are stuck in PENDING or COMPLETING states unexpectedly.
  • When GRES or GPU counts appear incorrect.
  • When scontrol ping fails or the controller is unresponsive.
  • When HyperPod auto-recovery or auto-resume fails to trigger as expected.

Advantages

  • Prevents accidental state mutation by enforcing a strict read-only policy.
  • Streamlines troubleshooting by mapping symptoms to specific documentation.
  • Reduces manual log parsing by automating diagnostic data collection.
  • Provides clear escalation paths for hardware-specific or complex issues.

Usage examples

“Investigate why my Slurm nodes are stuck in down state.”
The agent runs the diagnostic script to check slurmd status and system logs, then reports the findings and links to the relevant troubleshooting documentation.
“Diagnose a Slurm node that is not responding.”
The agent identifies the node's state and provides a summary of potential causes like disk full or network partitions, referencing the appropriate AWS troubleshooting guide.
“Why are my jobs stuck PENDING with REASON=Resources?”
The agent checks the controller state and resource accounting, identifying if a desync exists and pointing the user to the correct controller restart or reconfiguration procedures.

Install

  1. Download the skill as a ZIP:

    https://autogineer.com/agent-skills/awslabs/hyperpod-slurm-debugger/download
  2. Unzip it into the cross-client skills folder of your project:

    mkdir -p .agents/skills && unzip hyperpod-slurm-debugger.zip -d .agents/skills

Documentation by AWS Labs

HyperPod Slurm Debugger

Diagnostic-only. Identify and classify Slurm scheduler and node-daemon issues on HyperPod Slurm clusters. Do not run, recommend, or print any state-mutating command. For remediation, link to the official AWS or Slurm documentation.

When to invoke

Invoke when the user reports any of the symptoms in the decision table.

When NOT to invoke

  • Cluster has Orchestrator.Eks — invoke hyperpod-node-debugger or hyperpod-nccl.

  • Single-node hardware fault with healthy Slurm scheduler — invoke hyperpod-node-debugger.

  • NCCL training-hang investigation — invoke hyperpod-nccl.

  • Node unreachable via SSM — invoke hyperpod-ssm.

Constraints

  • Read-only. Do not run, recommend, or print state-mutating commands.

  • For any remediation, link to AWS or Slurm docs. The user authorizes and executes.

  • IaC-managed cluster (Terraform / CloudFormation / CDK): warn that direct mutation drifts the live state from the IaC plan.

Canonical recovery URLs: references/slurm-details.md → Authoritative recovery documentation.

Prerequisites

  • AWS CLI v2, authenticated for the target account and region with permissions:

    • sagemaker:DescribeCluster, sagemaker:ListClusterNodes

    • ssm:StartSession on the HyperPod-created SSM document

  • Session Manager plugin installed locally.

  • jq ≥ 1.6.

  • unbuffer (from the expect package). Required — without it aws ssm start-session returns empty stdout intermittently with Cannot perform start session: EOF and every check silently misreports. Install: expect package on Amazon Linux / RHEL / Debian / Ubuntu / macOS. Script exits at prerequisite check if missing.

Procedure

Step 1 — Collect inputs

Ask the user for:

  1. HyperPod cluster name (not Slurm partition name).

  2. AWS region.

  3. Optional: a specific Slurm node name.

Step 2 — Confirm orchestrator
aws sagemaker describe-cluster --cluster-name <NAME/ARN> --region <REGION> \
  --query 'Orchestrator' --output json

If Orchestrator.Eks is present, stop. Route per When NOT to invoke.

Step 3 — Run the diagnostic script
bash scripts/slurm-diagnose.sh --cluster <NAME> --region <REGION>
# Scope to a node:
bash scripts/slurm-diagnose.sh --cluster <NAME> --region <REGION> --node <SLURM_NODE>

Relay the script output to the user verbatim.

Step 4 — Map findings → docs

For each finding, look up the section in the decision table and link the user to the corresponding AWS / Slurm doc. Do not type out remediation commands.

Decision table

Symptom (sinfo -o "%N %T %30E" or script finding)Section
Node state = down or down*, reason other than belowA: Node Down
Node state = down*, Reason = Node unexpectedly rebootedB: Unexpected Reboot
Jobs PENDING with REASON=Resources while nodes are idleC: Controller State
Jobs stuck COMPLETING after node replacementC: Controller State
scontrol ping returns DOWN for the controllerC: Controller State
GRES (GPU) counts incorrect or not releasedC: Controller State
state=fail issued but no recovery occurredD: Action Reason Mismatch
Accounting errors or RPC errors mentioning dbdC: Controller State (slurmdbd)
slurm.conf edited; new partitions or nodes not visibleC: Controller State (config)
Job exited on a hardware failure but did not restartE: Auto-resume

Defaults

BehaviorDefaultOverride
Moderead-only — always; no remediation flag existsn/a
Region$AWS_DEFAULT_REGION, falling back to us-east-1--region <R>
Scopeall nodes in down / drain / fail / "unexpectedly rebooted"--node <SLURM_NODE_NAME>
Outputcolorized terminal--no-color
SSM target formatsagemaker-cluster:<clusterId>_<instanceGroupName>-<instanceId> (derived)n/a
Controller discovery--controller-group (if set) → SlurmConfig.NodeType=Controller → provisioning_parameters.json--controller-group <N>

Error handling

FailureSkill behaviorRequired user action
describe-cluster failsPrint AWS error; exit 1Fix credentials/region; verify cluster name
Cluster has Orchestrator.EksExit 1 with pointer to EKS-side skillsUse hyperpod-node-debugger or hyperpod-nccl
session-manager-plugin missing / SSM unreachablesinfo returns empty; exit 1Install plugin; verify node InService
Disk ≥ 95 % full on a down nodeReport finding disk-full-<node>Refer to AWS troubleshooting docs
Missing jq or awsExit 1 at prerequisite checkInstall per Prerequisites

A: Node Down

Node is down because slurmd stopped responding. Causes: slurmd crash, disk full, OOM, network partition, hardware fault.

Script checks: systemctl is-active slurmd, srun -w <NODE> hostname (RPC layer), disk, memory.

Link: https://github.com/aws/sagemaker-hyperpod-cluster-setup/blob/troubleshooting-doc-20250917/troubleshoot/index.md

If node returns to down after a manual resume → escalate to hyperpod-node-debugger.

Context: references/slurm-details.md § A.


B: Unexpected Reboot

Node is down* with Reason "Node unexpectedly rebooted" because slurmd re-registered after an out-of-band reboot. Upstream Slurm behavior, not HyperPod. Node is typically healthy.

Links:

If node reboots again within minutes → escalate to hyperpod-node-debugger.

Context: references/slurm-details.md § B.


C: Controller State

slurmctld in-memory state can desync from the on-disk state. A controller restart reloads from StateSaveLocation and clears bad caches. User decides and executes.

Restart may help:

SymptomWhy
PENDING with REASON=Resources, idle nodesRe-evaluates the queue
Jobs stuck COMPLETING after node replacementController held a reference to the old node
GRES (GPU, EFA) not released after a job endsResource accounting de-synced
Nodes stuck Unknown after reboot, slurmd is upRe-registration was not processed
scontrol ping times outController event loop is hung
Lost connection to slurmdbd / RPC errorsDBD connection wedged

Do NOT restart when:

  • HyperPod replacement (Action:Replace) in progress on any node — concurrent changes fail the replacement.

  • Only one compute node is bad — restart slurmd on that node.

  • sinfo and squeue are responsive — problem is elsewhere.

  • journalctl -u slurmctld not reviewed yet — panic / OOM will reproduce.

  • slurm.conf was just edited — try scontrol reconfigure first.

Folded triggers

Restart procedure / what's preserved:

Context: references/slurm-details.md § C.


D: Action Reason Mismatch

scontrol update state=fail reason=... was issued with a reason that does not match Action:Reboot or Action:Replace exactly. HyperPod silently ignores anything else. Script detects near-misses on nodes in fail state.

Required strings (case-sensitive, no whitespace, no punctuation):

  • Action:Reboot

  • Action:Replace

Link: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/sagemaker-hyperpod-resiliency-slurm-replace-faulty-instance.html

Context: references/slurm-details.md § Action reason-string validation.


E: Auto-resume

--auto-resume=1 is an srun step option. It re-runs the step after HMA (the Health Monitoring Agent) flags a node and Automatic node recovery replaces it.

Why it didn't restart the job:

  • Flag on sbatch not srun — per-step; sbatch directives are silently ignored.

  • HMA did not flag the node — failure was application/transient, not hardware. Step exits as a normal Slurm failure.

  • Cluster NodeRecovery is None — faulty nodes are labeled but not replaced.

  • No checkpointing — step restarts from process zero each iteration.

  • AMI predates HMA support (released 2025-09-11) — needs AMI / cluster-software update.

Link: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/sagemaker-hyperpod-resiliency-slurm-auto-resume.html

Context: references/slurm-details.md § HyperPod auto-resume.


Escalation

ConditionNext skill
Node returns to down shortly after a manual resumehyperpod-node-debugger (hardware)
slurmd logs contain CUDA / NVIDIA / XID errorshyperpod-node-debugger § G
Disk full or /dev/shm exhaustedhyperpod-node-debugger § I
Node unreachable via SSMhyperpod-ssm
Controller restart does not clear COMPLETING after 2 attemptshyperpod-issue-report + AWS Support

Files

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Requirements and compatibility

Works with: Claude Code, Claude apps, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Kiro, OpenCode, Goose, Amp, Roo Code, JetBrains Junie, Factory Droid, Devin (ex-Windsurf), Mistral Vibe, OpenHands, Letta

“Works with” means the tool reads the open Agent Skills format; a skill written for one tool may use features others lack.

Needs: Needs a command-line tool, Needs Node.js

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Attribution and licence

Published by
AWS Labs
Publisher
AWS Labs (Official)
Source
awslabs/agent-plugins · plugins/sagemaker-ai/skills/hyperpod-slurm-debugger · commit fbefb37
Licence
Apache License 2.0 (redistribution allowed)
  • LICENSE (added by AutoGineer from LICENSE)
  • NOTICE (added by AutoGineer from NOTICE)
  • ATTRIBUTION.md (written by AutoGineer)
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