[slurm-users] About x11 support

[Tina Friedrich]

Why would you run a slurmctld on a *submit* host? You only need the 
controller daemon on, well, the controllers (what I would still call 
'queue masters' :) ). Personally I'd make quite sure that no-one apart 
from admins has rights to log in to those, really!

In fact, you don't need to run any daemon on a submit host; it just 
needs access to the binaries and the cluster config. We run Centos, so I 
build the rpms; all I install on the login node(s) is 'slurm' - neither 
'slurmd' nor 'slurmctld' are required. Which is certainly not something 
you couldn't install on a bunch or workstations, especially if they are 
managed machines.

Tina

On 26/11/2018 23:23, Goetz, Patrick G wrote:
> I'm a little confused about how this would work.  For example, where
> does slurmctld run?  And if on each submit host, why aren't the control
> daemons stepping all over each other?
> 
> On 11/22/18 6:38 AM, Stu Midgley wrote:
>> indeed.
>>
>> All our workstations are submit hosts and in the queue, so people can
>> run jobs on their local host if they want.
>>
>> We have a GUI tightly integrated with our environment for our staff to
>> submit and monitor their jobs from (they don't have to touch a single
>> job script).
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 6:28 PM Tina Friedrich
>> <tina.friedrich at it.ox.ac.uk <mailto:tina.friedrich at it.ox.ac.uk>> wrote:
>>
>>      I really don't want to start a flaming discussion on this - but I don't
>>      think it's an unusual situation. I have, in likewise roughtly 15 years
>>      of doing this, not ever worked anywhere where people didn't have a GUI
>>      to submit from. It's always been a case of 'Wand to use the cluster?
>>      We'll make your workstation a submit host.'
>>
>>      I think it's a pretty standard way of handling things it you are an
>>      institute that runs their own (maybe small) cluster, especially if the
>>      workstations are also managed machine.
>>
>>      Tina
>>
>>      On 21/11/2018 23:26, Christopher Samuel wrote:
>>       > On 22/11/18 5:04 am, Mahmood Naderan wrote:
>>       >
>>       >> The idea is to have a job manager that find the best node for a
>>      newly
>>       >> submitted job. If the user has to manually ssh to a node, why one
>>       >> should use slurm or any other thing?
>>       >
>>       > You are in a really really unusual situation - in 15 years I've
>>      not come
>>       > across a situation before this where a user would have GUI access
>>      to a
>>       > system that can submit jobs directly to a cluster like you can.
>>       >
>>       > I'm not sure why Slurm has this restriction but it might be that
>>      you can
>>       > start up an xterm, change your $DISPLAY to be localhost:0 and see
>>      if you
>>       > can start an X11 application from that.  It might be that you'll
>>      need to
>>       > add an xauth cookie for localhost to get that going.
>>       >
>>       > If it does work then (hopefully) you can use that trick to fire
>>      up jobs
>>       > with X11 display forwarding.
>>       >
>>       > All the best,
>>       > Chris
>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Dr Stuart Midgley
>> sdm900 at gmail.com <mailto:sdm900 at gmail.com>