Dear devs, We are testing a concept where we are dynamically allocating a portion of our compute nodes with oversubscribed interactive nodes for low-intensity use. To make the use as simple as possible, we are testing redirecting user login sessions directly to these nodes via SLURM.
Basically the shell initialization on the actual login node contains a SLURM srun command to spawn an interactive session and the user gets "transparently" dropped into a shell session on a compute node. This would offer more flexibility than physically setting up a set of login nodes. Furthermore, SLURM should be able make better decisions on where to assign each incoming session based on resource usage than a more naive round-robin load balancer. This way also all interactive use can be tracked with SLURM's accounting. Based on simple initial testing this seems to work but it's still a bit hacky. My question is has anyone been doing similar things and what are your experiences? Are there some caveats that we should be aware of? Best regards, Olli-Pekka -- Olli-Pekka Lehto Development Manager Computing Platforms CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd. E-Mail: [email protected] Tel: +358 50 381 8604 skype: oplehto // twitter: ople
