Slurm accounts

Slurm accounts are different from login accounts (Nexus/WatIAM).

  • accounts in Slurm are used to track resource utilization so Slurm can manage limits on certain users or groups of users
  • Slurm accounts in association with Slurm partitions and Slurm QoS objects are used to control/limit access to cluster resources.
  • to use Slurm, your Nexus/WatIAM user ID has to be associated with one or more Slurm accounts 
  • normal accounts: these apply to all Slurm-managed resources except privately-owned resources that have dedicated accounts. normal account is the default account which means you don't have to use --account=normal option. By default, Slurm will select normal account
  • dedicated accounts: these apply to privately-owned resources. To selet these accounts you have to use --account=<account name> option (e.g. --account=hagrid).
    • use the account name hagrid for the Hagrid cluster. To access hagrid, --account=hagrid and --partition=hagrid_batch Slurm sbatch/srun options have to used. That is you have to use the following two option as part of sbatch script: 
      
#SBATCH --account=hagrid
#SBATCH --partition=hagrid_batch
    • use the account name barrio1 for the barrio1 machine. To access barrio1 cluster, you have to use the following options 
      
#SBATCH --account=barrio1
#SBATCH --partition=barrio1

Slurm quality of service (QoS) objects are used to set resource limits, job priority and job preemption rules. Slurm account resource limits are set by associating the account to one of the QoS objects.

Commands for Slurm account info

A Slurm account's resource limit is set using Slurm QoS objects. So, to find out the resource limit set for a Slurm account, you need the QoS name associated with the account. You can get that from the table shown above, or by using the Slurm sacctmgr command. For example, to find the resource limit for the normal account, from the table we see that the normal QoS is associated with normal account, so run the following command:

sacctmgr show qos normal format=Name%15,MaxJobsPU,MaxSubmitjobsPU,MaxTresPU%40