[slurm-users] sharing licences with non slurm workers

[Davide DelVento]

Ciao Matteo,

If you look through the archives, you will see I struggled with this
problem too. A few people suggested some alternatives, but in the end
I did not find anything really satisfying which did not require a ton
of work for me.

Another piece of the story is users requesting a license but not using
it (I don't think there is a solution there, other than perhaps make
them "pay" something with their allocation to discourage the problem)
and others NOT requesting the license but using it nevertheless,
throwing up slurm count. I think the latter could be solved
programmatically in slurm, but it felt like too much work compared to
simply educating the users... Depending on your userbase (and their
well-behaveness) you might or might not have this issue.

Cheers,
Davide


On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 8:06 AM Matteo Guglielmi
<Matteo.Guglielmi at dalco.ch> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
>
> we have a license server which is allocating licenses to a bunk of workstation
>
> not managed with slurm (completely independent boxes) and the nodes of a cluster,
>
> all managed with slurm.
>
>
> I wrote a simple script that keeps querying the number of licenses used by the
>
> outside "world" and changes the total number of available license in the slurm
>
> database.
>
>
> Everything works as expected except when all licenses are used outside of slurm.
>
>
> When this occurs, the total number of licenses is set to zero and slurm refuses
>
> to accept any job asking for one or more licenses with this error message:
>
>
> "sbatch: error: Batch job submission failed: Invalid license specification"
>
>
> So,
>
>
> is there a way to configure slurm to still accept and queue jobs even when the
>
> total number of licenses is set temporarily to zero?
>
>
> If my approach is not correct,
>
>
> is there a way to share a common license server between slurm workers and non
>
> slurm workers?
>
>
> Thank you.
>