Dask-Jobqueue SLURMCluster with Singularity

SLURMCluster_vs_Singularity.ipynb

Thanks! I'd love to know if you have any remarks on this.

hey @willirath - sorry it took me so long to test this out! I just tested this on our cluster, and my first shot (using an OnDemand notebook) I wasn't able to even start the dask cluster - this error in particular: dask/distributed#3156. I then moved to an interactive session and could confirm that I could start the cluster outside of the nodebook, so I decided to go with that. I took notes here. It seemed to do okay when I wanted a fairly small cluster, but when I tried to scale it, the interface was (and still is) essentially frozen, because getting nodes allocated just takes that long. It's been over 30 minutes and still hanging on that submit, so I don't think (at least for our crowded cluster) this would be an approach that many folks would jump into. This makes me sad, because it's another failure on my part to find some modern way for our users to submit jobs. The cloud is so easy and fast, and local resources are always painful I'm afraid. :/

Hi @vsoch, I've left a few comments in your repo (not sure if in-line comments on the commit are a good way to do this).

In working with Dask on HPC, I've found that the typical scheduler configs often are not made with many small jobs in mind. As Dask jobqueue just submits one job per node, this often is not a good fit. An alternative that might be closer to how the HPC admins want their machine to be used is dask-mpi.

Oh interesting! I'm going to try the dask-mpi right now. We definitely have mpi on our cluster.

You could also skip the automatic deployment methods entirely and use `srun` to start a scheduler using the CLI `dask-scheduler` with the scheduler file arg and point `srun ... dask-worker` calls to the scheduler via the scheduler file.

I could try that - I just did a search for "srun" in the dask docs and came up empty. Is there an example somewhere of this?

See this gist for using salloc and srun with the Dask cli.

Okay testing this out! When you say

Within the allocation, make sure you have dask etc (e.g. by activating a virtual or conda env).

Do you mean to have the environment sourced in my profile or something else?

No, I mean right after the sallloc you get a fresh shell where you need to, e.g., conda activate the env that has Dask installed.

(I think it's rarely advisable to activate envs automatically.)

haha okay, I haven't gotten my allocation yet so that's why I haven't seen that yet :)

You might be able to speed that up by explicitly setting a relatively short wall time (1 hour or so). Depends on how the SLURM scheduler is configured but I was told they often like short jobs that can be used for backfilling while the big jobs wait for a large chunk of the cluster to become available.

Hi @willirath.
Thanks a lot for this exemple, that's really something I want to make work. I've been trying to reproduce on a small local cluster that uses SLURM.

So:

1. I've created an image of the container: singularity build --remote esm-vfc-stacks_latest.sif docker://esmvfc/esm-vfc-stacks:latest
2. then run it: singularity run esm-vfc-stacks_latest.sif jupyter lab --no-browser --ip=login0.frioul
3. Running inside the notebook your steps: pip install dask_jobqueue, overwritting sbatch, squeue, scancel. So I have a job_script so looks correct:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

#SBATCH -J dask-worker
#SBATCH -e /home/arsouze/pangeo/tests/logs/dask-worker-%J.err
#SBATCH -o /home/arsouze/pangeo/tests/logs/dask-worker-%J.out
#SBATCH -n 1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=40
#SBATCH --mem=159G
#SBATCH -t 00:20:00
#SBATCH -C quad,cache
export I_MPI_DOMAIN=auto
export I_MPI_PIN_RESPECT_CPUSET=0
module load intel intelmpi
singularity run /home/arsouze/pangeo/esm-vfc-stacks_latest.sif python -m distributed.cli.dask_worker tcp://195.83.183.81:36584 --nthreads 10 --nprocs 4 --memory-limit 42.50GB --name name --nanny --death-timeout 60 --local-directory $SCRATCHDIR --host ${SLURMD_NODENAME}.frioul

but when I try to scale I have the following error message:

Task exception was never retrieved
future: <Task finished coro=<_wrap_awaitable() done, defined at /srv/conda/envs/notebook/lib/python3.7/asyncio/tasks.py:623> exception=RuntimeError('Command exited with non-zero exit code.\nExit code: 255\nCommand:\nsbatch /tmp/tmplbeliirt.sh\nstdout:\n\nstderr:\n\n')>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/srv/conda/envs/notebook/lib/python3.7/asyncio/tasks.py", line 630, in _wrap_awaitable
    return (yield from awaitable.__await__())
  File "/srv/conda/envs/notebook/lib/python3.7/site-packages/distributed/deploy/spec.py", line 50, in _
    await self.start()
  File "/srv/conda/envs/notebook/lib/python3.7/site-packages/dask_jobqueue/core.py", line 310, in start
    out = await self._submit_job(fn)
  File "/srv/conda/envs/notebook/lib/python3.7/site-packages/dask_jobqueue/core.py", line 293, in _submit_job
    return self._call(shlex.split(self.submit_command) + [script_filename])
  File "/srv/conda/envs/notebook/lib/python3.7/site-packages/dask_jobqueue/core.py", line 393, in _call
    "stderr:\n{}\n".format(proc.returncode, cmd_str, out, err)
RuntimeError: Command exited with non-zero exit code.
Exit code: 255
Command:
sbatch /tmp/tmplbeliirt.sh
stdout:

stderr:

and the slurm job doesn't get submitted...
I think that at this point, I'm not clear on what is failing in the workflow. Do you have any hints ?

I'd debug this with manual slurm commands:

1. Can you use the sbatch over SSH workaround? I'd check by trying if,

ssh $(hostname) -q -t ". /etc/profile && squeue [maybe more args]"

gives the same output as the equivalend squeue command directly run on the host machine.

2. Then, the question is, if the job script that is written to some tmp location by the SLURMCluster running within the container is readable on the host machine.

3. Finally, can you sumbit the job script from the tmp file with sbatch via SSH?

(edited: Add third point)

0. Can you SSH back into the host machine? The error could stem from ssh $(hostname) not being possible (at least without a password). You'd need to set up SSH keys for this.

Thx for your quick answer. Indeed, thanks to a local security feature provided by our admins, ssh $(hostname) is refused ! Will resume once they remove that.

We have come up with a little convenience tool that provides a structured way of bind mounting host-system SLURM libraries into a Singularity container session and thus enables the batch scheduler commands. This approach omits the SSH restrictions that system administrators might have set up (we also use such an HPC system, which has motivated that development).

All you need is to come up with a system-specific "configuration file" (which needs basically a one-time exploratory session with a few strace commands to isolate the necessary batch scheduler shared libraries and configuration files). Make sure you have read the compatibility section, though, as there are a few limitations: https://github.com/ExaESM-WP4/Batch-scheduler-Singularity-bindings

/cc @vsoch and @thomasarsouze

This is great, thank you so much for this! Only needed minor tweaks to account for differences in my cluster and the singularity version.