[slurm-users] Licenses: Remote vs Reservation

[Brian Andrus]

Richard,

If you don't have a large cluster, doing the local license method is 
actually feasible. The biggest issue is the efforts to ensure all the 
nodes have the same slurm.conf and then the traffic when they are all 
re-queried to report their status on a reconfigure.

That said, I have had good experience with the remote license method. 
the info is kept as part of the slurmdbd, so you will need that setup 
for it to work.

I imagine one of the factors may be the purpose of the license tracking. 
Is it to cause jobs to queue if there are no licenses available or not 
be allowed to submit at all? The reservation method can cause an sbatch 
command to be rejected, if that is what you are looking for.

Brian Andrus

On 11/30/2022 6:29 AM, Richard Ems wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have to change our set up to be able to update the total number of 
> available licenses due to users checking out licenses interactively.
> We now use Local Licenses, and could just regularly update slurm.conf 
> and reconfigure, but I don't think that is the best solution.
>
> I see there are at least two other options:
> 1. Remote Licenses as per https://slurm.schedmd.com/licenses.html
> 2. The "older" method of creating an infinite license only reservation 
> and letting jobs request license from there
>
> What are the pros and cons of both methods?
> What would you suggest based on your experience?
>
> Many thanks for any input,
> Richard