Quickstart

Basic usage

You can run CATS with:

A basic command to run CATS when a job duration and postcode are provided.

$ cats --duration 480 --location "EH8"

The --location option is optional, and can be pulled from a configuration file (see Using a configuration file), or inferred using the server’s IP address.

The --duration option indicates the expected job duration in minutes.

The scheduler then calls a function that estimates the best time to start the job given predicted carbon intensity over the next 48 hours. The workflow is the same as for other popular schedulers. Switching to CATS should be transparent to cluster users.

It will display the time to start the job on standard out and optionally some information about the carbon intensity on standard error.

Using a configuration file

Information about location can be provided by a configuration file instead of a command line arguments to the cats command.

location: "EH8"

Use the --config option to specify a path to the configuration file, relative to the current directory.

In case of a missing location command line argument, cats looks for a file named config.yaml in the current directory.

#  Override duration value at the command line
cats --config /path/to/config.yaml --location "OX1"

#  location information is assumed to be provided in
#  ./config.yaml.  If not, 'cats' errors out.
cats --duration 480

Displaying carbon footprint estimates

CATS is able to provide an estimate for the carbon footprint reduction resulting from delaying your job. To enable the footprint estimation, you must provide the --footprint option, the memory consumption in GB and a hardware profile:

cats --duration 480 --location "EH8" --footprint --memory 8 --profile <my_profile>

The --profile option specifies information power consumption and quantity of hardware the job using. This information is provided by adding a section profiles to the cats YAML configuration file.

You can define an arbitraty number of profiles as subsection of the top-level profiles section:

An example provision of machine information by YAML file to enable estimation of the carbon footprint reduction.

profiles:
  my_cpu_only_profile:
    cpu:
      model: "Xeon Gold 6142"
      power: 9.4 # in W, per core
      nunits: 2
  my_gpu_profile:
    gpu:
      model: "NVIDIA A100-SXM-80GB GPUs"
      power: 300
      nunits: 2
    cpu:
      model: "AMD EPYC 7763"
      power: 4.4
      nunits: 1

The name of the profile section is arbitrary, but each profile section must contain one cpu section, or one gpu section, or both. Each hardware type (cpu or gpu) section must contain the power (in Watts, for one unit) and nunits sections. The model section is optional, meant for documentation.

When running cats, you can specify which profile to use for carbon footprint estimation with the --profile option:

cats --duration 480 --location "EH8" --footprint --memory 6.7 --profile my_gpu_profile

The default number of units specified for a profile can be overidden at the command line:

cats --duration 480 --location "EH8" --footprint --memory 16 \
     --profile my_gpu_profile --gpu 4 --cpu 1

Warning

The --profile option is optional. Is not provided, cats uses the first profile defined in the configuration file as the default profile.