[slurm-users] Noob slurm question

[Thomas M. Payerle]

Slurm accounting is based on the notion of "associations".  An association
is a set of cluster, partition, allocation account, and user.  I think most
sites do the accounting so that it is a single limit applied to all
partitions, etc. but you can use sacctmgr to apply limits at any
association level.  Normally you would set GrpTRESmin at the required
level.  The GrpTRESmin values apply at the association you set them and on
all child associations.

So while most sites would do something like e.g.
    set GrpTRESmin=cpu=N for allocation acct Acct1
thereby allowing members of Acct1 to use (as a group) N cpu-minutes
combined across all partitions, you could also do something like
    set GrpTRESmin=cpu=N for allocation Acct1 and
    set GrpTRESmin=cpu=A for allocation Acct1 and partitionA
    set GrpTRESmin=cpu=B for allocation Acct1 and partitionB
In this scenario, users of Acct1 can use at most A cpu-min on partitionA
and B on paritionB, subject to combined usage on all partitions (A, B, and
anything else) does not exceed N.

Underneath the covers, Slurm and PBS accounting behave a bit differently
--- IIRC in PBS you assign "credits" to accounts which then get debited as
jobs run.  In Slurm, each association tracks usage as jobs run, and you can
configure limits on the usage at various levels.

The tools for reporting usage of allocation accounts in Slurm leave
something to be desired; sshare is the underlying tool but not very user
friendly, and I find sbank leaves a lot to be desired.
I have some Perl libraries interfacing with sshare, etc. on CPAN (ihttps://
metacpan.org/pod/Slurm::Sshare) which include a basic sbalance command
script.  You would likely need to modify the script for your situation (it
assumes a situation more like the first example above), but that should not
be too bad.



On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 1:58 PM Merritt, Todd R - (tmerritt) <
tmerritt at email.arizona.edu> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>                 I'm new to slurm. I've used PBS extensively and have set
> up an accounting system that gives groups/account a fixed number of hours
> per month on a per queue/partition basis. It decrements that time
> allocation with every job run and then resets it to the original value at
> the start of the next month. I had hoped that slurm would do this natively
> but it doesn't seem like it does. I came across sbank which sounds like it
> would implement this but it also seems like it would span partitions and
> not allow separate limits per partition. Is this something that has already
> been implemented or could be done in an easier way than what I'm trying?
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Todd
>


-- 
Tom Payerle
DIT-ACIGS/Mid-Atlantic Crossroads        payerle at umd.edu
5825 University Research Park               (301) 405-6135
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20740-3831
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