[slurm-users] Single user consuming all resources of the cluster

[Bill Barth]

Of course, Matteo. Happy to help. Our job completion script is:

#!/bin/bash

OUTFILE=/var/log/slurm/tacc_jobs_completed

echo "$JOBID:$UID:$ACCOUNT:$BATCH:$START:$END:$SUBMIT:$PARTITION:$LIMIT:$JOBNAME:$JOBSTATE:$NODECNT:$PROCS" >> $OUTFILE

exit 0

and our config settings (from scontrol show config) are:

JobCompLoc              = /etc/slurm/tacc_job_completion.sh
JobCompType             = jobcomp/script

Feel free to steal as much of that as you like, just update the lines and names to remove the “tacc” parts. This script needs to be present on the machine that slurmctld is running on. Our internal accounting system is RESTful, so we’re thinking of using this mechanism to write accounting records to it directly in this plugin script with curl/wget calls rather than appending to our flat file and shipping that info to our database via cron script nightly. That would give us the ability to do live updates of balances (which the Slurm DB already supports) to prevent overdrawn accounts. This is convoluted, but we have had to reinvent the wheel a little since we need to report usage to both our local accounting database and a national one. Yes, there were probably other ways to do this, but the infrastructure is now historical and set in some stone.

Best,
Bill.

-- 
Bill Barth, Ph.D., Director, HPC
bbarth at tacc.utexas.edu        |   Phone: (512) 232-7069
Office: ROC 1.435            |   Fax:   (512) 475-9445
 
 

On 2/7/18, 12:28 AM, "slurm-users on behalf of Matteo F" <slurm-users-bounces at lists.schedmd.com on behalf of mfasco984 at gmail.com> wrote:

    Thanks Bill, I really appreciate the time you spent giving this detailed answer. 
    I will have a look at the plugin system as the integration with out accounting system would be a nice feature.
    
    
    
    
    @Chris thanks, I've had a look GrpTRES but I'll probably go with the Spank route.
    
    
    Best, 
    Matteo
    
    On 6 February 2018 at 13:58, Bill Barth 
    <bbarth at tacc.utexas.edu> wrote:
    
    Chris probably gives the Slurm-iest way to do this, but we use a Spank plugin that counts the jobs that a user has in queue (running and waiting) and sets a hard cap on how many they can have. This should probably be scaled to the size of the system and the
     partition they are submitting to, but on Stampede 2 (4200 KNL nodes and 1736 SKX nodes), we set this, across all queues to about 50, which has been our magic number, across numerous schedulers over the years on systems ranging from hundreds of nodes to Stamped2e
     1 with 6400. Some users get more by request and most don’t even bump up against the limits. We’ve started to look at using TRES on our test system, but we haven’t gotten there yet. Our use of the DB is minimal, and our process to get every user into it when
     their TACC account is created is not 100% automated yet (we use the job completion plugin to create a flat file with job records which our local accounting system consumes to decrement allocation balances, if you care to know).
    
    Best,
    Bill.
    
    --
    Bill Barth, Ph.D., Director, HPC
    bbarth at tacc.utexas.edu        |   Phone:
    (512) 232-7069 <tel:%28512%29%20232-7069>
    Office: ROC 1.435            |   Fax:   (512) 475-9445 <tel:%28512%29%20475-9445>
    
    
    
    On 2/6/18, 6:03 AM, "slurm-users on behalf of Christopher Samuel" <slurm-users-bounces at lists.schedmd.com on behalf of
    chris at csamuel.org> wrote:
    
        On 06/02/18 21:40, Matteo F wrote:
    
        > I've tried to limit the number of running job using Qos ->
        > MaxJobsPerAccount, but this wouldn't stop a user to just fill up the
        > cluster with fewer (but bigger) jobs.
    
        You probably want to look at what you can do with the slurmdbd database
        and associations. Things like GrpTRES:
    
        
    https://slurm.schedmd.com/sacctmgr.html <https://slurm.schedmd.com/sacctmgr.html>
    
        # GrpTRES=<TRES=max TRES,...>
        #     Maximum number of TRES running jobs are able to be allocated in
        # aggregate for this association and all associations which are children
        # of this association. To clear a previously set value use the modify
        # command with a new value of -1 for each TRES id.
        #
        #  NOTE: This limit only applies fully when using the Select Consumable
        # Resource plugin.
    
        Best of luck,
        Chris