Moab Workload Manager® for Grids

17.19 Case Study: Grid Overflow

Overview

NCSA owns a 512-processor cluster, part of which they want to make available to clients for use when needed. They want to create a protected area of their cluster, containing 64 processors, to which clients have priority access. When those resources are not in use by clients, they would like to use them for internal workload. However, any client workload that shows up would be able to preempt NCSA internal workload on those processors.

NCSA wants to establish a service level agreement with each client, including a billing rate. Each client should have control over when NCSA resources are used. Tracking the actual resource usage by each client should be as automated as possible.

NCSA wants to maintain a high level of security by maintaining tight control over access to their shared resources and encrypting communication to and from each client. They also want to minimize the overhead of providing access to clients to avoid affecting scheduling performance for their clients and themselves.

Goals

The goals of establishing a relationship with a peer site in order to share extra capacity include the following:

Simplicity

There should be no visible change to end-users.

Responsiveness

The scheduler should handle rapid workload changes by making migration decisions in less than one minute.

Automated Accounting

Periodic reports should be generated for both NCSA and their clients showing overflow usage and billing information.

Security

Communication should be encrypted and authenticated using secret keys or X.509 certificates.

High Throughput

The scheduling overhead should be low enough to allow 1,000 jobs to be evaluated every 15 minutes.

Analysis

The best way to avoid any user-visible changes is to allow Moab to migrate jobs transparently by creating a peer relationship with another instance of Moab. This allows users to continue to submit jobs normally, while experiencing the increased turn-around time gained by using the additional resources.

Moab has flexible and convenient mechanisms for handling authorization and mapping user credentials on one system to a different set of credentials on a peer system. It also supports encryption and authentication using secret keys or certificates.

Moab is designed to handle large numbers of jobs during scheduling. The additional work of evaluating jobs for migration to a peer instance of Moab adds only a minor amount of computation. Moab can immediately begin migrating jobs when a preconfigured backlog threshold is reached.

Client (Job Source) Configuration

# this name is used for identification
SCHEDCFG[client1]  TYPE=NORMAL
SCHEDCFG[client1]  SERVER=localserver:42559

# allow jobs to run locally as well
RMCFG[base]        TYPE=PBS

# create the peer connection
RMCFG[overflow]    TYPE=MOAB
RMCFG[overflow]    SERVER=moab://moab.ncsa.uiuc.edu:42559

# map local credentials to remote equivalent
RMCFG[overflow]    CREDMAP=file:///opt/moab/credmap.txt

# only use NCSA resources when backlog threshold is exceeded
SRCFG[shared]      QLIST=shared
QOSCFG[shared]     BACKLOGTHRESHOLD=24

# key should be the same for both peers
CLIENTCFG[RM:overflow]  KEY=thisisthekey  AUTH=admin1

# format: [LOCALCRED],[REMOTECRED]
user:clientuser,peeruser
user:steve,sjohnson
group:test,company1
class:batch,serial

NSCA (Job Destination) Configuration

# define the scheduler
SCHEDCFG[ncsa]     TYPE=NORMAL
SCHEDCFG[ncsa]     SERVER=moab://scheduler:42559

# allow jobs to run locally as well
RMCFG[base]        TYPE=PBS

# define each client using local credentials
RMCFG[client1]     FLAGS=CLIENT  CLIENT=client1  AUTHGLIST=company1
RMCFG[client2]     FLAGS=CLIENT  CLIENT=client2  AUTHGLIST=company2

# limit incoming job rate for each client
RMCFG[client1]     FLOWMETRIC=jobs  FLOWLIMIT=20  FLOWINTERVAL=5:00:00
RMCFG[client2]     FLOWMETRIC=jobs  FLOWLIMIT=12  FLOWINTERVAL=0:30:00

# use QOS to allow local jobs to be preempted by client jobs
PREEMPTPOLICY      REQUEUE
QOSWEIGHT          1
QOSCFG[localjobs]  QFLAGS=PREEMTEE

# put all local jobs into the localjobs QOS by default
USERCFG[DEFAULT]   QDEF=localjobs

# create the grid sandbox
SRCFG[sandbox1]    PERIOD=INFINITY
SRCFG[sandbox1]    HOSTLIST=node0[1-9],node[1-5][0-9],node6[0-4]

# enable grid jobs and allow client1 to preempt jobs
SRCFG[sandbox1]    FLAGS=ALLOWGRID,OWNERPREEMPT
SRCFG[sandbox1]    OWNER=CLUSTER:client1,CLUSTER:client2

# allow client1 to have access to sandbox
SRCFG[sandbox1]    CLUSTERLIST=client1,client2

# allow local jobs to use unused resources within sandbox
SRCFG[sandbox1]    QOSLIST=localjobs

# define key for each client
CLIENTCFG[RM:client1]  KEY=thisisthekey  AUTH=admin1
CLIENTCFG[RM:client2]  KEY=mykeyiscool1  AUTH=admin1

Monitoring

The mdiag -R command will allow both NCSA and their clients to monitor how many jobs flow over to NCSA's grid sandbox. Detailed information about what types of jobs are migrating can be obtained using job profiles.

Conclusion

Creating peer relationships between clusters allows great flexibility in how sites can work with each other to increase their overall efficiency and meet their own goals. Creating a unidirectional peer relationship from each of the clients allows NCSA to provide an overflow service that is beneficial to both parties. Clients can choose to use NCSA's resources to reduce their workflow backlog, and NCSA can provide overflow capacity to their clients and bill for usage.