I don't know off hand. You can sort of construct a similar system in
Slurm, but I've never seen it as a native option.
-Paul Edmon-
On 6/20/19 10:32 AM, John Hearns wrote:
Paul, you refer to banking resources. Which leads me to ask are
schemes such as Gold used these days in Slurm?
Gold was a utility where groups could top up with a virtual amount of
money which would be spent as they consume resources.
Altair also wrote a similar system for PBS, which they offered to us
when I was in Formula 1 - it was quite a good system, and at the time
we had a requirement for allocating resources to groups of users.
I guess the sophisticated fairshare mechanisms discussed in this
thread make schemes like Gold obsolete.
On Thu, 20 Jun 2019 at 15:24, Paul Edmon <ped...@cfa.harvard.edu
<mailto:ped...@cfa.harvard.edu>> wrote:
People will specify which partition they need or if they want
multiple they use this:
#SBATCH -p general,shared,serial_requeue
As then the scheduler will just select which partition they will
run in first. Naturally there is a risk that you will end up
running in a more expensive partition.
Our time limit is only applied to our public partitions, our owned
partitions (of which we have roughly 80) have no time limit. So
if they run on their dedicated resources they have no penalty.
We've been working on getting rid of owned partitions and moving
to a school/department based partition, where all the purchased
resources for different PI's go into the same bucket where they
compete against themselves and not the wider community. We've
found that this ends up working pretty well as most PI's only used
their purchased resources sporadically. Thus there are usually
idle cores lying around that we backfill with our serial queues.
Since those are requeueable we can get immediate response to
access that idle space. We are also toying with a high priority
partition that is open to people with high fairshare so that they
can get immediate response as those with high fairshare tend to be
bursty users.
Our current halflife is set to a month and we keep 6 months of
data in our database. I'd actually like to get rid of the
halflife and just go to a 3 month moving window to allow people to
bank their fairshare, but we haven't done that yet as people have
been having a hard enough time understanding our current system.
It's not due to its complexity but more that most people just flat
out aren't cognizant of their usage and think the resource is
functionally infinite.
-Paul Edmon-
On 6/19/19 5:16 PM, Fulcomer, Samuel wrote:
Hi Paul,
Thanks..Your setup is interesting. I see that you have your
processor types segregated in their own partitions (with the
exception of of the requeue partition), and that's how you get at
the weighting mechanism. Do you have your users explicitly
specify multiple partitions in the batch commands/scripts in
order to take advantage of this, or do you use a plugin for it?
It sounds like you don't impose any hard limit on simultaneous
resource use, and allow everything to fairshare out with the help
of the 7 day TimeLimit. We haven't been imposing any TimeLimit on
our condo users, which would be an issue for us with your config.
For our exploratory and priority users, we impose an effective
time limit with GrpTRESRunMins=cpu (and gres/gpu= for the GPU
usage). In addition, since we have so many priority users, we
don't explicitly set a rawshare value for them (they all execute
under the "default" account). We set rawshare for the condo
accounts as cores-purchased/total-cores*1000.
What's your fairshare decay setting (don't remember the proper
name at the moment)?
Regards,
Sam
On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 3:44 PM Paul Edmon
<ped...@cfa.harvard.edu <mailto:ped...@cfa.harvard.edu>> wrote:
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?
