Attempting to SLURM spawn from Hub without `sudo`

[John Muchovej]

Hi, all:

(I wager my questions are due to ignorance, so please feel free to tell me to search certain things, as I've yet to find anyone who's dealt with something similar.)

I run the AI club at my university and we're currently attempting to provide access to the GPU cluster during meetings. We have a fall-back solution, but Hub is the ideal setup.

Our meetings are conducted through Notebooks and we have a two constraints:

1. The cluster batches via SLURM
2. Each "user account" has a randomized password which can't be retrieved – we solve this by using GitHub OAuth and match each GH user to a pre-existing system user.

What I've done so far:

• Hub successfully runs
• GitHub OAuth and username_map do their job
• SlurmSpawner appears to function as intended

SlurmSpawner is where this breaks down. My user account (course) doesn't have sudo access. This means that when any spawner tries to initialize a new server for a student, it fails. The way the system has been architected makes all student<N> accounts members of my course group (which is also my "user group").

So, I'm curious of two things:

1. Is there a way to have a "local sudo" – where my user account can effectively sudo -u student<N> as long as they're in my group? (I've never seen this done, but wonder if it might be doable.)
2. If (1) isn't feasible, has anyone ever encountered an issue of not being capable of sudo-ing but still launching Notebooks via Hub on a cluster?

Best,
John

	John Muchovej Researcher, Data Scientist
j...@ionlights.com+1 (617) 575-9866 https://ionlights.com/