Chapter 5 Strict Allocation Setup Guide
With the strict allocation accounting mode, you can establish rigorous limits on the use of compute resources by your various parties. This is done by associating a cost for the usage by deciding on a currency unit, generically referred to as credits, whether based on a real currency such as dollars, or a reference currency such as billing units or processor-seconds, and then creating charge rates based on this currency. Funds are established to contain credit allocations attributed to specific accounts. Users are designated as members of the accounts. Deposits are made into funds associated with the accounts creating allocations. An allocation cycle may be established whereby allocations are considered for renewal on a regular periodic basis (such as yearly, quarterly or monthly).
Before a job is started, Moab Workload Manager will verify that the user has sufficient credits to run the job by attempting to place a hold against their funds (referred to as a lien). When a job completes, the user's funds will be debited via a charge, usage information will be recorded for the job and the lien will be removed. Users or managers can query the status of their allocations or details of their job charges and resource utilization.
You will need to be a Moab Accounting Manager System Administrator to perform many of the tasks in this chapter. It is assumed that you have already installed Moab Workload Manager and installed, bootstrapped, and started Moab Accounting Manager before performing the steps discussed in this chapter.
For testing or demo purposes, an initialization script is available that provides a similar affect to running the example commands in this chapter to minimally set up MAM for the strict-allocation accounting mode with a small amount of dummy sample data. It will not perform the Moab configuration steps described in this chapter. It can be cleaned up by running the hpc-cleanup.sh script.
$ ./hpc-strict-allocation.sh