Today I found myself needing to set up a minimal SLURM cluster on my laptop for simple testing purposes. As always, there were some challenges along the way and I had to consult multiple installation guides and stackoverflow questions to make everything fit together. Here is what worked for me.

Set up munge

$ sudo apt install munge

Test if it works:

$ munge -n | unmunge
STATUS:           Success (0)
[...]

Set up MariaDB

From here

$ sudo apt install mariadb-server
$ sudo mysql -u root
create database slurm_acct_db;
create user 'slurm'@'localhost';
set password for 'slurm'@'localhost' = password('slurmdbpass');
grant usage on *.* to 'slurm'@'localhost';
grant all privileges on slurm_acct_db.* to 'slurm'@'localhost';
flush privileges;
exit

Set up SLURM

$ sudo apt install slurmd slurm-client slurmctld

Use configurator.html to create the SLURM config file. There is one oneline here but it is only useful for the last version.

Find out which version you have (dpkg -l | grep slurm, mine was 17.11.2). Go to https://www.schedmd.com/archives.php and download the package correspond to your version (ended up with a small version mismatch, worked out anyway).

Unpack and enter directory, then build en run the Configuration Tool

$ cd slurm-17.11.10
$ ./configure
$ make html
$ xdg-open doc/html/configurator.html

• Fill in all NodeName/Hostname field in with own hostname(1).
• For testing, fill in root for SlurmUser.
• Make sure that the slurmd and slurmctld PID file path are the same as listed in the systemd file (/lib/systemd/system/slurmd.service).
• You might want to look at the Number of CPUs setting
• Copy-paste to /etc/slurm-llnll/slurm.conf.

Create a file /etc/slurm-llnl/cgroup.conf:

CgroupAutomount=yes
CgroupReleaseAgentDir="/etc/slurm/cgroup"
ConstrainCores=yes
ConstrainDevices=yes
ConstrainRAMSpace=yes

Restart daemons

sudo systemctl restart slurmctld
sudo systemctl restart slurmd

Running sinfo should show no errors:

$ sinfo
PARTITION AVAIL  TIMELIMIT  NODES  STATE NODELIST
debug*       up   infinite      1   idle a715

Test an actual job

Run sleep 1 on 8 processors:

$ time srun -n8 sleep 1
srun -n8 sleep 1  -- 1,20s (0,01s(u) + 0,00s(s) 6kb 0+49 ctx)

Some useful debugging commands

$ slurmctld -D
$ slurmd -D
$ sinfo

Set up mail (optional)

Install postfix

$ sudo apt install postfix mailutils

Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and change

inet_interfaces = loopback-only

Restart and test locally.

$ sudo systemctl restart slurmctld
$ sudo systemctl restart slurmd
$ srun --mail-type=ALL hostname
$ cat /var/mail/$(whoami)  | grep Subject

If everything went well, you should now have your own private computer cluster up and running :)