Friday, August 26, 2011

Really Super Quick Start Guide to Setting Up SLURM

SLURM is the awesomely-named Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management written by the good people at LLNL. It's basically a smart task queuing system for clusters. My cluster has always run Sun Grid Engine, but it looks like SGE is more or less dead in the post-Oracle Sun software apocalypse. In light of this and since SGE recently looked at me the wrong way, I'm hoping to ditch it for SLURM. I like pop culture references and software that works.

The "Super Quick Start Guide" for LLNL SLURM has a lot of words, at least one of which is "make." If you're lazy like me, just do this:

0. Be using Ubuntu
1. Install: # apt-get install slurm-llnl
2. Create key for MUNGE authentication: /usr/sbin/create-munge-key
3a. Make config file: https://computing.llnl.gov/linux/slurm/configurator.html
3b. Put config file in: /etc/slurm-llnl/slurm.conf
4. Start master: # slurmctld
5. Start node: # slurmd
6. Test that fool: $ srun -N1 /bin/hostname

Bam.

(In my config file, I specified "localhost" as the master and the node. Probably a good place to start.)