What is duke-cluster?

A set of instructions for submitting and troubleshooting jobs on Duke University's Slurm computing cluster, a shared system for running workloads on remote machines.

Use it before submitting Slurm jobs, when a job cannot be scheduled, or when selecting compute resources on the Duke CS cluster.

It helps choose suitable partitions, GPUs, memory, time limits, storage locations, and environment settings so jobs can run and be scheduled correctly.

duke-cluster — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by TianchenGuan

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add TianchenGuan/duke-cs-cluster-skill --skill duke-cluster

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TianchenGuan/duke-cs-cluster-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tianchenguan/duke-cs-cluster-skill/duke-cluster/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tianchenguan/duke-cs-cluster-skill/duke-cluster)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tianchenguan/duke-cs-cluster-skill/duke-cluster"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tianchenguan/duke-cs-cluster-skill/duke-cluster/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tianchenguan/duke-cs-cluster-skill/duke-cluster"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tianchenguan/duke-cs-cluster-skill/duke-cluster.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 64 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,923 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00064	$0.03923
Opus 5.5	$0.00026	$0.01569
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00013	$0.00785
Haiku 4.5	$0.00006	$0.00392

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 18b74d32f04d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

duke-cluster scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (scripts/check_cluster_load.sh, scripts/check_gpu_contention.sh, scripts/check_my_jobs.sh, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

duke-cluster/SKILL.md · 250 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 250 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Duke CS Compute Cluster

Skill version: 3 Applies to: Duke Computer Science Slurm cluster (login.cs.duke.edu) Last verified: 2026-04-13 via sinfo, scontrol show partition, sacctmgr, module avail, 12 smoke jobs. Regenerate with: bash scripts/verify_skill.sh and update tables. Docs: https://computing.cs.duke.edu — subpages: Compute/{cluster, slurm, gpu-computing}, Storage/disk_usage, Software/{environment-modules, apptainer}.

Pre-Flight Checklist

Every job script should do all of the following. Copy from templates/ — don't reconstruct from memory.

set -euo pipefail — fail fast on errors, undefined vars, broken pipes.

Set cache dirs explicitly (never rely on inheritance):

export HF_HOME=/usr/xtmp/$USER/.cache/huggingface
export TORCH_HOME=/usr/xtmp/$USER/.cache/torch
export PIP_CACHE_DIR=/usr/xtmp/$USER/.cache/pip

Always specify --mem — the default is 4.5 GB, too low for any real work.
Always specify --time — the default is 4 days, which blocks scheduling.
Point --output/--error to /usr/xtmp/%u/... or $HOME — never /tmp (node-local, invisible from login node).
Log GPU info: nvidia-smi -L 2>/dev/null || echo 'none'

Partitions

Only compsci and compsci-gpu are generally accessible. Other partitions (grisman, wiseman, nlplab, nlplab-core, bhuwan, rudin, skynet, wills) are lab-specific — submit with -A PARTITIONNAME -p PARTITIONNAME.

Partition	Purpose	Default time	Max time	Nodes	Total CPUs	GPUs?	Default mem
`compsci`	CPU work	4 days	90 days	48	2,448	No	4.5 GB
`compsci-gpu`*	GPU work	4 days	90 days	62	3,192	Yes (217 total)	4.5 GB

* compsci-gpu is the default partition. No debug partition exists — use --time=00:05:00 for quick smoke tests. No preemption (PreemptMode=OFF).

Read the full file on GitHub · 250 lines

Files

What ships with it

15 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 250 lines · 64 tokens per session scan A 18b74d32f04d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

duke-cluster is a skill published in the GitHub repository TianchenGuan/duke-cs-cluster-skill (6 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 64 tokens to every session and 3,923 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Cloud DevOps and cloud Scientific

duke-cluster next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
duke-clusterTianchenGuan/duke-cs-cluster-skill	Skill	6	6mo ago	MIT	A	64	Claude Code, Codex
nextflowK-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills	Skill	56k	4d ago	MIT	A	74	Claude Code, Codex
latchbio-integrationK-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills	Skill	56k	4d ago	MIT	A	78	Claude Code
remote-compute-sshaipoch/open-science	Skill	5.5k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	53	Claude Code, Codex
modal-computecompanion-inc/feynman	Skill	10k	6d ago	MIT	A	39	Claude Code, Codex
dnanexus-integrationsynthetic-sciences/openscience	Skill	4.3k	2d ago	Apache-2.0	A	49	Claude Code, Codex
latchbio-integrationsynthetic-sciences/openscience	Skill	4.3k	2d ago	Apache-2.0	A	45	Claude Code, Codex