slurm VS Ansible

I'm trying to have Slurm automatically switch partitions to a specific one via the job_sutmit.lua plugin whenever our users request strictly more than 8 cpus. But trying to extract or calculate ahead of time how many cpus will be allocated or requested isn't trivial (to me). Are there attributes in job_submit that could help out with this task? For example, I don't see any job->desc.ntasks attribute in https://github.com/SchedMD/slurm/blob/master/src/plugins/job_submit/lua/job_submit_lua.c. Any information or documentation on how to leverage job_submit.lua would be appreciated.

Do you have a reason to use kubernetes besides it’s the $CURRENT tech? Why not stick with what you’re already familiar with (batch job managers) and use SLURM, a workload and resource manager, like many others in HPC? Do the researchers need to schedule against Nvidia GPU resources now or in the future? Nvidia themselves recommend SLURM.

Quantum computing and supercomputers are two different things. Quantum computers are currently an area of research, there isn't a version ready for use apart from some prototypes, and it will probably stay that way for while. Also, quantum computing will most likely not be a completly new architecture, that all of the chips we use will adopt, but an addition to current chipsets for some important but special tasks. Supercomputers, or HPC (High performance clusters) are classic computers, just that they are huge. They use derivatives of "off-the-shelf", but high end, hardware. There is a lot of interesting work in designing such systems, a lot of challenging problems in distributed systems theory, but they aren't a complete detached industry. Using them for work, not designing them, doesn't require a EECS type degree, they guy who sit's next to me in the office, uses a supercomputer to predict protein folding, he is by training a doctor and now does computational microbiology. The applications for massive compute power (often times "just brute force the solution instead of spending years in the lab") are almost endless, but to use them it's not that important to understand the full details of how they are constructed, domain knowledge in the application domain is much more important. If you know how your cluster is structured, and knowledge of slurm etc. will enable you to use the supercomputer just fine, again, they aren't that different from regular computers, just that you workstation might have 1 CPU and your supercomputer has 500. Hiding this complexity is done by slurm or any other resource manager. It's open source as well :) https://github.com/SchedMD/slurm

SLURM (distributed by OpenHPC) If you have shared storage then this is the industry standard solution that is both open source and free (extremely popular in the top 500 list). You can pair this with a high speed network or not depending on your research workloads.

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.