[slurm-users] Submitting jobs from machines outside the cluster

[Loris Bennett]

Steven Swanson <sjswanson at ucsd.edu> writes:

> Can I submit jobs with a computer/docker container that is not part of the slurm cluster?
>
> I'm trying to set up slurm as the backend for a system with Jupyter Notebook-based front end.  
>
> The jupyter notebooks are running in containers managed by Jupyter Hub, which is a mostly turnkey system for providing docker containers that users can
> access via jupyter.
>
> I would like the jupyter containers to be able to submit jobs to slurm, but making them part of the cluster doesn't seem to make sense because:
>
> 1.  They are dynamically created and don't have known hostnames.
> 2.  They aren't supposed to run jobs.
>
> Is there a way to do this?  I tried just running slurmd in the jupyter containers, but it complained about not being able to figure out its name (I think because
> the container's hostname is not listed in slurm.conf).
>
> My fall back solution is to use ssh to connect to the slurm head node and run jobs there, but that seems kludgy.
>
> -steve
>

I'm not sure what your use-case is, so the following might not be
relevant.

Our Jupyter Notebook users don't want to submit jobs from their
notebooks.  Instead they want to run their notebooks interactively, but
make use of cluster resources.  To do this, they submit a job on the
login node which sets up an SSH tunnel between the compute node and
their local machine and then starts jupyter-lab.  The users can then can
point the browsers on their local machines to a local port and be
connected to the session on the compute node.

Cheers,

Loris

-- 
Dr. Loris Bennett (Herr/Mr)
ZEDAT, Freie Universität Berlin