Vagrant Slurm

Warning: For demonstration/testing purposes only, not suitable for use in production

This repository contains a Vagrantfile and the necessary configuration for automating the setup of a Slurm cluster using Vagrant's shell provisioning on Debian 12 x86_64 VMs.

Prerequisites

This setup was developed using vagrant-libvirt with NFS for file sharing, rather than the more common VirtualBox configuration which typically uses VirtualBox's Shared Folders. However, VirtualBox should work fine.

The core requirements for this setup are:

• Vagrant (with functioning file sharing)
• (Optional) Make (for convenience commands)

Cluster Structure

• node1: Head Node (runs slurmctld)
• node2: Login/Submit Node
• node3 / node4: Compute Nodes (runs slurmd)

By default, each node is allocated:

• 2 threads/cores (depending on architecture)
• 2 GB of RAM

Warning: 8 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM is used in total resources

Quick Start

1. To build the cluster, you can use either of these methods

   Using the Makefile (recommended):

   make
   

   Using Vagrant directly:

   vagrant up
   

2. Login to the Login Node (node2) as the submit user:

   vagrant ssh node2 -c "sudo -iu submit"
   

3. Run the example prime number search script:

   /vagrant/primes.sh
   

   By default, this script searches for prime numbers from 1-10,000 and 10,001-20,000

   You can adjust the range searched per node by providing an integer argument, e.g.:

   /vagrant/primes.sh 20000
   

   The script will then drop you into a watch -n0.1 squeue view so you can see each job computing on nodes[3-4]. You may CTRL+c out of this view, and the jobs will continue in the background. The home directory for the submit user is in the shared /vagrant directory, so the results from each node are shared back to the login node.

4. View the resulting prime numbers found, check ls for exact filenames

   less slurm-1.out
   less slurm-2.out
   

Configuration Tool

On the Head Node (node1), you can access the configuration tools specific to the version distributed with Debian. Since this may not be the latest Slurm release, it's important to use the configuration tool that matches the installed version. To access these tools, you can use Python to run a simple web server:

python3 -m http.server 8080 --directory /usr/share/doc/slurm-wlm/html/

You can then access the HTML documentation via the VM's IP address at port 8080 in your web browser on the host machine.

Cleanup

To clean up files placed on the host through Vagrant file sharing:

make clean

This command is useful when you want to remove all generated files and return to a clean state. The Makefile is quite simple, so you can refer to it directly to see exactly what's being cleaned up.