Show HN: Virtual SLURM HPC cluster in a Docker Compose

github.com

12 points by ciclotrone 5 days ago

I'm the main developer behind vHPC, a SLURM HPC cluster in a docker compose.

As part of my job, I'm working on a software solution that needs to interact with one of the largest Italian HPC clusters (Cineca Leonardo, 270 PFLOPS). Of course developing on the production system was out of question, as it would have led to unbearably long feedback loops. I thus started looking around for existing containerised solutions, which were always lacking some key ingredient in order to suitably mock our target system (accounting, MPI, out of date software, ...).

I thus decided that it was worth it to make my own virtual cluster from scratch, learning a thing or two about SLURM in the process. Even though it satisfies the particular needs of the project I'm working on, I tried to keep vHPC as simple and versatile as possible.

I proposed the company to open source it, and as of this morning (CET) vHPC is FLOSS for others to use and tweak. I am around to answer any question.

robot-wrangler 5 minutes ago

Thanks for this! I went looking for something similar a while back and found nothing much. I'm guessing that the alternative to this tidy modern repository is a gigantic broken pile of ansible/chef/puppet that hasn't been touched in 10 years.

Even surprisingly popular distributed-systems stuff is always really bad about "follow this 10 step copy/paste to deploy to EKS" but that's also obnoxious. In the first place, people want to see something basically working on small scale first to check if it's abandonware. But even after that.. local prototyping without first setting up multiple repositories, then shipping multiple modified container images, and already having CI/CD for all of the above is really nice to have.

ZeroCool2u 13 minutes ago

Interesting, I've been dealing with replacing a few on-prem HPC clusters lately. One of the things we've been looking at is OpenOnDemand. How does this compare to that? Is this primarily targeted at cluster development or can I really just make an arbitrarily large production HPC cluster with it?