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• Interactive: The ability to assign all or part of a node to a user with shell level access (nodescheduler, qsub -I, etc),  minimal granularity is per NUMA node, finer would be useful.  Because Slurm and HTCondor lack the ability to implement nodescheduler, my current thought is to ditch nodescheduler and just use the interactive commands that come with Slurm and HTCondor.
  

  • nodescheduler: Was written before I understood what qsub -I did.  Had I known, I may have argued to use qsub -I instead of nodescheduler as it is much simpler, is consistent with other installations of Torque, and may have forced some users to use batch processing which is much more efficient.
    
  • nodescheduler likes
    
    • It's not tied to any tty so a user can login multiple times from multiple places to their reserved node without requiring something like screen, tmux, or vnc.  It also means that users aren't all going through nmpost-master.
      
    • Its creation is asynchronous.  If the cluster is full you don't wait around for your reservation to start, you get an email message when it is ready.
    • It's time limited (e.g. two weeks).  We might be able to do the same with a queue/partition setting but could we then extend that reservation?
    • We get to define the shape of a reservation (whole node, NUMA node, etc).  If we just let people use qsub -I they could reserve all sorts of sizes which may be less efficient.  Then again it may be more efficient.  But either way I think nodescheduler it is simpler for our users.
  • nodescheduler: dislikes
    • With Toruqe/Moab asking for a NUMA node doesn't work as I would like.  Because of bugs and limitations, I still have to ask for a specific amount of memory.  The whole point of asking for a NUMA node was that I didn't need to know the resources of a node ahead of time but could just ask for half of a node. Sadly, that doesn't work with Torque/Moab.
    • Because of the way I maintain the cgroup for the user, with /etc/cgrules.conf, I cannot let a user have more than one nodescheduler job on the same node or it will be impossible to know which cgroup an ssh connection should use.  The interactive commands (qsub -I, etc) don't have this problem.
  • Slurm - I think the biggest blocker here is slurm doesn't have an equivalent to naccesspolicy=uniqueuser.
    
    • srun -p interactive --pty bash This logs the user into an interactive shell on a node with defaults (1 core, 1 GB memory) in the interactive partition.
    • NUMA I don't see how Slurm can reserve NUMA nodes so we may have to just reserve X tasks with Y memory.
    • naccesspolicy=uniqueuser I don't know how to keep Slurm from giving a user multiple portions of the same host.  With Moab I used naccesspolicy=uniqueuser which prevents the ambiguity of which ssh connection goes to which cgroup.  I could have nodescheduler check the nodes and assign one that the user isn't currently using but this is starting to turn nodescheduler into a scheduler of its own and I think may be more complication than we want to maintain.
    • cgrules Slurm has system-level prolog/epilog functionality that should allow nodesceduler to set /etc/cgrules.conf but pam_slurm_adopt.so pretty much removes the need for /etc/cgrules.conf.
      
    • PAM The pam_slurm.so module can be used without modifying systemd and will block users that don't have a job running from logging in.  The pam_slurm_adopt.so module required removing some pam_systemd modeules and does what pam_slurm.so does plus will put the user's login shell in the same cgroup as the slurm job expected to run the longest, which would replace my /etc/cgrules.conf hack.  This still doesn't solve the problem of multiple interactive jobs by the same user on the same node.  Removing the pam_systemd.so module prevents the creation of things like /run/user/<UID> and the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and  XDG_SESSION_ID which breaks VNC.  So we may want to use just pam_slurm.so and not pam_slurm_adopt.so.
    • nodeextendjob Can Slurm extend the MaxTime of an interactive job? Yes scontrol update TimeLimit=7 JobId=489  This sets the MaxTime to seven minutes.
  • HTCondor
    • condor_submit -i This logs the user into an interactive shell on a node with defaults (1 core equivelent, 0.5 GB memory)
    • NUMA I don't see how HTCondor can reserve NUMA nodes so we may have to just reserve X tasks with Y memory.
    • naccesspolicy=uniqueuser I don't think I need to worry about giving a user multiple portions of the same host if we are using condor_ssh_to_job.
    • cgrules I don't know if HTCondor has the prologue/epilogue functionality to implement my /etc/cgrules.conf hack.
    • PAM How can we allow a user to login to a node they have an interactive job running on via nodescheduler?  With Torque or Slurm there are PAM modules but there isn't one for HTCondor.
    • Could run a sleep job just like we do with Torque and use condor_ssh_to_job which seems to do X11 properly.  We would probably want to make gygax part of the nmpost pool.
  • nodevnc
    • Given the limitation of Slurm and HTCondor and that we already recommend users use VNC on their interactive nodes, why don't we just provide a nodevnc script that reserves a node (via torque, slurm or HTCondor), start a vnc server and then tells the user it is ready and how to connect to it?  If someone still needs/wants just simple terminal access, then qsub -I or srun --pty bash or condor_submit -i might suffice.
    • But of course there is another problem.  This time it is because Slurm and HTCondor don't actually run /bin/login so proper things like /run/user/<USERID> are not created and vncserver produces a Call to lnusertemp failed.  Yet it works for krowe on rastan using but not krowe on testpost001 nor krowe2 on rastan.
      
      • NO: try /bin/bash -l
      • NO: try --get-user-eval=L
      • NO: try --get-user-eval=S
      • Is this because I had to remove some systemd things to get pam_slurm_adopt working?  Was one of those things what created /run/user/<UID>?
      • Could I just creat /run/user/<UID> in a prolog script?
    • Yet it works for krowe on rastan using https://hpc-aub-users-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/octopus/interactive_job.html#create-vnc-configuration but not krowe on testpost001 nor krowe2 on rastan.  This is probably because there is a /run/user/5213 on rastan that I created a while ago as a test. pam_systemd creates /run/user/<UID> when a user logs in except when I have removed pam_systemd in favor of pam_slurm_adopt.
      
      • If I create /run/user/5213 on the host, then I can launch vnc via slurm.
      • I need to test if I can run Xvfb without /run/user/<UID>. If I can't then using pam_slurm_adopt is a non-starter for us.  A simple CASA test shows that xvfb-run works.
        
      • While it doesn't break CASA it pretty much does break VNC.  Which is also a non-starter for us.
      • A work-around could be something like the following, but there might be other things broken because of the missing /run/user/<UID> and ${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/gvfs is actually a fuse mount and reaper does not know how to umount things.
        
        • mkdir /tmp/${USER}
        • export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp/${USER}
        • Or using loginctl enable-linger and disable-linger in prolog/epilog scripts?
    • Reading up on how pam_slurm_adopt works, it will probably never cooperate with systemd and therefore it a hack and not future-proof.  https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/13535  I am unsure how wise it is to start using pam_slurm_adopt in the first place.
    • So if I don't install pam_slurm_adopt.so, which I only installed because it seemed better than my /etc/cgrules.conf hack, which I only created for nodescheduler after we started using cgroups, then I think I can get nodevnc working as a pseudo-replacement for nodescheduler.  If we do use nodevnc and don't use nodescheduler (which we mostly can't) then we may not want to use the pam_slurm.so module either so that users can't login to nodes they have reserved and possibly use resources they aren't scheduled for.
    • I think I should be able to get nodevnc working with HTCondor except it is getting the same lnusertemp errors because /varrun/runuser/<UID> isn't being created.  I think I will try upgrading htcondor on the testpost cluster to see if that fixes it.  Updating htcondor may not solve the problem entirely.  I submitted a job at CHTC (htcondor-8.9.11) and while it started Xvnc and vncserver -list showed a working display (:1), I couldn't connect to it with vncviewer so I don't know if it is actually working properly or not.  I wouldn't know if I was getting the lnusertemp error until I connected with vncviewer anyway and CHTC doesn't seem to create /run/user/<UID>.
      
    • HTCondor doesn't seem to create /run/user/<UID>.  I have tested here (8.9.7) and at CHTC (8.9.11).  This makes me think that even if I can get vncserver working, which I may have done at CHTC, it still will give me the lnusertemp error if I connect, which I can't do at CHTC.
  • Other options
    • screen
    • tmux
    • others?

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