"thomas.hartmann--- via slurm-users" slurm-users@lists.schedmd.com writes:

I have three sets of accounts (each can have child accounts):

1. "General" accounts: These are allowed to use all physical nodes.
2. "ForProfit" accounts: These absolutely must not use the project_A_* nodes
3. "Project_A" accounts: Their jobs should run first and foremost on the project_A_* nodes but they are also allowed to run on the node* nodes.

My first idea would be to create two partitions, one with all nodes in there and a second one with only those nodes that the "ForProfit" are allowed to use. Using "AllowAccounts" or "DenyAccounts" would implement the restriction I need.

That will work, but will not ensure that Project_A jobs first land on the projectt_A_* nodes (unless you give these nodes a lower weight - but then the General jobs will also start there first).

You could add a third partition with the project_A_* nodes, and only give Project_A access to it. You can then give this partition a higher PriorityTier than the other partitions, meaning that jobs asking for that partitions will be scheduled first. Users of project_A should then submit jobs with -p project_A_part,General_part, or you could add some logic in your job_submit.lua that makes sure this happens.

Users are associated with one or more accounts.

If you can avoid this ( I know that's a big "if"), avoid it! Humans being humans (lazy) and users begin users (copying existing work as much as possible), if a user has multiple accounts, there is a damn good chance they'll submit jobs to the wrong accounts eventually, messing up priority/fairshare and accounting/billing, which will eventually add up to headaches for you.

I know it's not always possible to eliminate it, and it can be needed/desirable to have this capability. If you can minimize it as much as possible, though, it will minimize headaches for you.

I did work at one place where a Slurm user could only belong to one account at a time to prevent those sort of issues.

Prentice

On 5/21/25 4:25 AM, thomas.hartmann--- via slurm-users wrote:

Hi, I'm going to have the following situation on my hands and I would like to ask for some suggestions how to solve this in slurm. We're talking about a cluster that is not yet operational so there are no real legacy configs that one needs to take into account.

I have two sets of physical nodes:

1. node01 - nodeXX: General Purpose Nodes. Everybody can use them
2. project_A_01 - project_A_XX: These nodes come with some restrictions regarding who can and who must not run jobs on them.

Users are organized into accounts, pseudohierarchically representing workgroups / projects etc within the university. For instance, there is going to be a "physics" account with "project_blackhole", "workgroup_miller" as children. Users are associated with one or more accounts.

I have three sets of accounts (each can have child accounts):

1. "General" accounts: These are allowed to use all physical nodes.
2. "ForProfit" accounts: These absolutely must not use the project_A_* nodes
3. "Project_A" accounts: Their jobs should run first and foremost on the project_A_* nodes but they are also allowed to run on the node* nodes.

My first idea would be to create two partitions, one with all nodes in there and a second one with only those nodes that the "ForProfit" are allowed to use. Using "AllowAccounts" or "DenyAccounts" would implement the restriction I need.

In the future, there might be more project specific nodes for other projects.

I would be grateful for any alternative solution or hints, how this could be solved optimally.

Thanks a lot! Thomas