A co-worker of mine (Paddy Doyle) had originally hacked at a perl script for reporting balances from SLURM’s accounting system a year or two ago and he had figured out that it might be possible to do some minimalistic ‘configuration’ and scripting to get a system that’s very basic but functional.
It was just one of those things that funding agencies wanted to justify how the system was being used, GOLD was clunky and obtrusive and complicated for what we wanted. Most of all we liked SLURM but not GOLD and Maui which was needed to get full accounting and banking (most of the features weren’t used).
Being good and lazy engineers we got excited with the prospect of having the option of replacing SLURM, Maui and GOLD with just plain old SLURM we set out to write down the workflows for what we wanted to do and what the user and funding agencies actually wanted. With those ideas in mind we set out to implement as much as we could and needed in just plain old sh/bash scripting with a splash of perl. Replacing two components with one meant that we would have less work to do in the long run ;)
After a whole year of running with these scripts and just putting it online, I’ve noticed that there may be a few sites out there that might be using our scripts and workflows. It would be nice to find out how many people are using our implementation of a banking system in SLURM and if it’s driven by sysadmins looking to account for usage or is it funding agencies looking for justification of the usage of a system.
I was going to be at the SLURM User Group Meeting 2012 to give a short talk on our experiences with the SLURM-Bank scripts and workflow, but sadly I have to be in the US during this meeting and my colleague “Paddy Doyle” will there instead of me. I would have liked to go and chat with the developers of SLURM to push for more advanced banking/accounting facilities in SLURM itself. Visiting BSC again would have been fun.
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See Also
- slurm user group meeting 2012
- cports for building applications and libraries for hpc systems
- a poor mans nas device with ceph
- scientific linux 6 build environment for ceph
- installing ceph on sl6