Problem

A job on the Pawsey supercomputers fails immediately after it starts with the message “srun: error: Unable to create job step: More processors requested than permitted”.

Solution

This indicates a mismatch between the resources specified to srun and those specified to sbatch/salloc. For example, the number of tasks to execute on does not match the number of cores allocated. Make sure in your job script the resources match both in the sbatch/srun directives and in the flags to the srun command, for example if you need 24 cores:

#!/bin/bash -l 

[..]
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=128
[..]

srun --export-all -n 1 -c 128 <..>