Chapter 5 Fast Allocation Setup Guide
If you want to enforce allocations by debiting funds in Moab Accounting Manager, but need higher throughput by eliminating the lien and quote operations of the strict allocation accounting mode, you can use the fast allocation accounting mode. With the fast allocation accounting mode, Moab Workload Manager checks a cached account balance, and jobs or reservations may be prevented from starting or continuing after the balance has become zero or negative. As with the strict allocation accounting mode, you establish 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 check its internal cache to verify that the user has a positive account balance. When a job completes, the user's funds will be debited via a charge, usage information will be recorded for the job and Moab's account balance cache is updated. Since Moab Accounting Manager is not contacted at job submission or start time in order to verify account membership, additional configuration is needed in Moab to synchronize account information with Moab Accounting Manager. Additionally, since the cache in Moab Workload Manager supports only account based funds, when using the fast allocation accounting mode, funds having no constraints or having non-account constraints should not be used.
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 fast-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-fast-allocation.sh