[slurm-users] Proposal for new TRES - "Processor Performance Units"....

[Paul Edmon]

We do a similar thing here at Harvard:

https://www.rc.fas.harvard.edu/fairshare/

We simply weight all the partitions based on their core type and then we 
allocate Shares for each account based on what they have purchased.  We 
don't use QoS at all, so we just rely purely on fairshare weighting for 
resource usage.  It has worked pretty well for our purposes.

-Paul Edmon-

On 6/19/19 3:30 PM, Fulcomer, Samuel wrote:
>
> (...and yes, the name is inspired by a certain OEM's software 
> licensing schemes...)
>
> At Brown we run a ~400 node cluster containing nodes of multiple 
> architectures (Sandy/Ivy, Haswell/Broadwell, and Sky/Cascade) 
> purchased in some cases by University funds and in others by 
> investigator funding (~50:50).  They all appear in the default SLURM 
> partition. We have 3 classes of SLURM users:
>
>  1. Exploratory - no-charge access to up to 16 cores
>  2. Priority - $750/quarter for access to up to 192 cores (and with a
>     GrpTRESRunMins=cpu limit). Each user has their own QoS
>  3. Condo - an investigator group who paid for nodes added to the
>     cluster. The group has its own QoS and SLURM Account. The QoS
>     allows use of the number of cores purchased and has a much higher
>     priority than the QoS' of the "priority" users.
>
> The first problem with this scheme is that condo users who have 
> purchased the older hardware now have access to the newest without 
> penalty. In addition, we're encountering resistance to the idea of 
> turning off their hardware and terminating their condos (despite MOUs 
> stating a 5yr life). The pushback is the stated belief that the 
> hardware should run until it dies.
>
> What I propose is a new TRES called a Processor Performance Unit (PPU) 
> that would be specified on the Node line in slurm.conf, and used such 
> that GrpTRES=ppu=N was calculated as the number of allocated cores 
> multiplied by their associated PPU numbers.
>
> We could then assign a base PPU to the oldest hardware, say, "1" for 
> Sandy/Ivy and increase for later architectures based on performance 
> improvement. We'd set the condo QoS to GrpTRES=ppu=N*X+M*Y,..., where 
> N is the number of cores of the oldest architecture multiplied by the 
> configured PPU/core, X, and repeat for any newer nodes/cores the 
> investigator has purchased since.
>
> The result is that the investigator group gets to run on an 
> approximation of the performance that they've purchased, rather on the 
> raw purchased core count.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
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