using future on a computing cluster with slurm

[ktyssowski]

I'm trying to use future (with Seurat) on a university computing cluster with slurm. I'm requesting 4-8 cores using the -c flag in my SBATCH script, so they should all be on the same node. However, it does not seem to be able to fork to more than one core. When I run the following:

library(future)

numCores = as.integer(Sys.getenv("SLURM_CPUS_ON_NODE"))
plan(multicore, workers=8)
print(availableCores(methods='mc.cores'))
print(numCores)
print(availableCores("multicore") > 1L)

I get:

current 
      1 
[1] 8
nproc 
FALSE 

so it seems like it's unable to find the correct number of available cores -- is there some reason I should expect this configuration to be incompatible with multicore mode? -- it's not Windows and I'm not using RStudio. Any ideas how to fix it?