Account / partition association on heterogeneous clusters

[Jesse Stroik]

Our cluster has two primary groups of users. The users groups each have
a different account from which we designate shares and for which we
provide accounting information.

We are in the process of adding nodes for which CPU time has a very
different practical value to the end users. If users used these nodes
their shares provide them less value.

To mitigate this, we've created a new partition ('amd') and we've set up
an additional account for each group.

group1
group2
group1-amd
group2-amd

Each user has multiple associations. For example:

group1 ourcluster 9000
group2 ourcluster 1000

group1 ourcluster alice 100 regular-partition
group1-amd ourcluster alice 100 amd-partition

group2 ourcluster bob 100 regular-partition
group2-amd ourcluster bob 100 amd-partition

One issue with this is users who can only use one partition get a
smaller share of the total system. Another is that we cannot set a
default account per user-partition combination. For example, if Alice
wants to submit to --partition amd-partition, she must also specify -A
group1-amd or she will get an invalid user/partition error.

Is there a better way to do this? We don't see a way to allow SLURM to
search the association tables for a valid account for the user/partition
combination.

Best,
Jesse Stroik
University of Wisconsin

[Jesse Stroik]

We ended up working around our needs by writing a program that provided
users with the appropriate settings.

It may be something to consider for future releases of slurm to be able
to automatically use any available and valid account given a
user-partition request, or allow administrators to set a default account
for each user-partition combination.

Best,
Jesse Stroik
University of Wisconsin

Post by Jesse Stroik
Our cluster has two primary groups of users. The users groups each have
a different account from which we designate shares and for which we
provide accounting information.
We are in the process of adding nodes for which CPU time has a very
different practical value to the end users. If users used these nodes
their shares provide them less value.
To mitigate this, we've created a new partition ('amd') and we've set up
an additional account for each group.
group1
group2
group1-amd
group2-amd
group1 ourcluster 9000
group2 ourcluster 1000
group1 ourcluster alice 100 regular-partition
group1-amd ourcluster alice 100 amd-partition
group2 ourcluster bob 100 regular-partition
group2-amd ourcluster bob 100 amd-partition
One issue with this is users who can only use one partition get a
smaller share of the total system. Another is that we cannot set a
default account per user-partition combination. For example, if Alice
wants to submit to --partition amd-partition, she must also specify -A
group1-amd or she will get an invalid user/partition error.
Is there a better way to do this? We don't see a way to allow SLURM to
search the association tables for a valid account for the user/partition
combination.
Best,
Jesse Stroik
University of Wisconsin