Slurm Administration
tiCrypt uses a dual-Slurm architecture. Global Slurm runs at the platform level and schedules VM provisioning across physical hosts. It never sees job content, job scripts, or data. Local Slurm runs inside each encrypted enclave, and is the instance researchers interact with when they run sbatch, srun, or squeue. From the researcher's perspective, the commands and output are identical to a traditional cluster.
A job is submitted on the local side and starts running on the global side. A researcher's sbatch reaches Local Slurm, which intercepts it and forwards a resource request onward; Global Slurm then starts the job and provisions worker VMs, and those VMs join the Local Slurm cluster where the job's code actually runs. Job failures propagate up to Global Slurm.
Every view in this section reads Global Slurm. The jobs, nodes, and accounts shown in the Management console are the platform-level scheduling and accounting records: which VMs were provisioned, for whom, and what they consumed. The Local Slurm instance inside a project's enclave is not visible here, which is why an administrator can account for cluster usage without being able to see what any job actually ran.
This section covers the administrative side: reviewing the Global Slurm configuration, deciding which tiCrypt VMs may use each partition, monitoring nodes, worker VMs and jobs, and setting the Slurm account of each VM configuration.
For background on how this architecture works and why tiCrypt splits Slurm into two layers, see Shared Computing to tiCrypt. For the security design, see Secure HPC with Slurm.
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Slurm Configuration | The Global Slurm configuration, read-only |
| Partition Assignments | Which teams, projects and VM configurations may use each Global Slurm partition |
| Slurm Diagnostics | Scheduler statistics from Global Slurm, read-only |
| Nodes | The state and resources of each Slurm compute node, read-only |
| Active Jobs | Running and queued jobs, and cancelling them |
| Worker VMs | Ephemeral VMs created by Global Slurm for batch jobs |
| Past Jobs | Accounting records of tiCrypt jobs from the last three days |
| VM Accounts | The Slurm account and fair share of each Slurm-capable VM configuration |
| User Accounts | Per-user Slurm share and usage figures, read-only |