[slurm-users] How to deal with user running stuff in frontend node?

[Pablo Escobar]

Hi Manuel,

A possible workaround is to configure a cgroups limit by user in the
frontend node so a single user cannot allocate more than 1GB of ram (or
whatever value you prefer). The user would still be able to abuse the
machine but as soon as his memory usage goes above the limit his job will
be killed by cgroup and this should not affect too much the users behaving
correctly.

In any case the best solution I know is a non technical one. When a user
abuse the system we close the account. He quickly sends and email asking
what happened and why he cannot login and we reply that as he abused the
system we won't open the account until his boss contacts us asking to
reopen it. After the user has to explain the "problem" to his/her boss they
don't abuse the system again ;)

regards,
Pablo.

2018-02-15 16:11 GMT+01:00 Manuel Rodríguez Pascual <
manuel.rodriguez.pascual at gmail.com>:

> Hi all,
>
> Although this is not strictly related to Slurm, maybe you can recommend me
> some actions to deal with a particular user.
>
> On our small cluster, currently there are no limits to run applications in
> the frontend. This is sometimes really useful for some users, for example
> to have scripts monitoring the execution of jobs and taking decisions
> depending on the partial results.
>
> However, we have this user that keeps abusing this system: when the job
> queue is long and there is a significant time wait, he sometimes runs his
> jobs on the frontend, resulting on a CPU load of 100% and some delays on
> using it for the things it is supposed to serve (user login, monitoring and
> so).
>
> Have you faced the same issue?  Is there any solution? I am thinking about
> using ulimit to limit the execution time of this jobs in the frontend to 5
> minutes or so. This however does not look so elegant as other users can
> perform the sabe abuse on the future, and he should also be able to run low
> cpu-consuming jobs for a longer period. However I am not an experienced
> sysadmin so I am completely open to suggestions or different ways of facing
> this issue.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
>
> Manuel
>
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