[slurm-users] sharing licences with non slurm workers

[Matteo Guglielmi]

Dear all,


we have a license server which is allocating licenses to a bunk of workstation

not managed with slurm (completely independent boxes) and the nodes of a cluster,

all managed with slurm.


I wrote a simple script that keeps querying the number of licenses used by the

outside "world" and changes the total number of available license in the slurm

database.


Everything works as expected except when all licenses are used outside of slurm.


When this occurs, the total number of licenses is set to zero and slurm refuses

to accept any job asking for one or more licenses with this error message:


"sbatch: error: Batch job submission failed: Invalid license specification"


So,


is there a way to configure slurm to still accept and queue jobs even when the

total number of licenses is set temporarily to zero?


If my approach is not correct,


is there a way to share a common license server between slurm workers and non

slurm workers?


Thank you.

[Davide DelVento]

Ciao Matteo,

If you look through the archives, you will see I struggled with this
problem too. A few people suggested some alternatives, but in the end
I did not find anything really satisfying which did not require a ton
of work for me.

Another piece of the story is users requesting a license but not using
it (I don't think there is a solution there, other than perhaps make
them "pay" something with their allocation to discourage the problem)
and others NOT requesting the license but using it nevertheless,
throwing up slurm count. I think the latter could be solved
programmatically in slurm, but it felt like too much work compared to
simply educating the users... Depending on your userbase (and their
well-behaveness) you might or might not have this issue.

Cheers,
Davide

[Matteo Guglielmi]

Just replying to my own mail here:


RTFM


So,


It was enough to add the following:


SchedulerParameters=allow_zero_lic


in slurm.conf

________________________________
From: slurm-users <slurm-use...@lists.schedmd.com> on behalf of Matteo Guglielmi <Matteo.G...@dalco.ch>
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2023 3:03:35 PM
To: slurm...@schedmd.com
Subject: [slurm-users] sharing licences with non slurm workers