# Resource Reservation Guide

SLURM version 2.0 has the ability to reserve resources for jobs being executed by select users and/or select bank accounts. A resource reservation identifies the resources in that reservation and a time period during which the reservation is available. The resouces which can be reserved include nodes and/or licenses. Note that resource reservations are not compatible with SLURM's gang scheduler plugin since the termination time of running jobs is not possible to accurately predict.

Note that reserved licenses are treated somewhat differently than reserved nodes. When nodes are reserved, then jobs using that reservation can use only those nodes and no other jobs can use those nodes. Reserved licenses can only be used by jobs associated with that reservation, but licenses not explicitly reserved are available to any job. This eliminates the need to explicitly put licenses into every advanced reservation created.

Reservations can be created, updated, or destroyed only by user root or the configured SlurmUser using the scontrol command. The scontrol, smap and sview commands can be used to view reservations. The man pages for the various commands contain details.

Note for users of Maui or Moab schedulers:
Maui and Moab are not integrated with SLURM's resource reservation system, but should use their own advanced reservation system.

## Reservation Creation

One common mode of operation for a reservation would be to reserve an entire computer at a particular time for a system down time. The example below shows the creation of a full-system reservation at 16:00 hours on 6 February and lasting for 120 minutes. The "maint" flag is used to identify the reservation for accounting purposes as system maintenance. The "ignore_jobs" flag is used to indicate that we can ignore currently running jobs when creating this reservation. By default, only nodes which are not expected to have a running job at the start time can be reserved (the time limit of all running jobs will have been reached). In this case we can manually cancel the running jobs as needed to perform system maintenance. As the reservation time approaches, only jobs that can complete by the reservation time will be initiated.

    $ scontrol create reservation starttime=2009-02-06T16:00:00 \
       duration=120 user=root flags=maint,ignore_jobs nodes=ALL
    Reservation created: root_3

    $ scontrol show reservation
    ReservationName=root_3 StartTime=2009-02-06T16:00:00
       EndTime=2009-02-06T18:00:00 Duration=120
       Nodes=ALL NodeCnt=20
       Features=(null) PartitionName=(null)
       Flags=MAINT,SPEC_NODES,IGNORE_JOBS Licenses=(null)
       Users=root Accounts=(null)

A variation of this would be to configure license to represent system resources, such as a global file system. The system resource may not may not require an actual license for use, but SLURM licenses can be used to prevent jobs needed the resource from being started when that resource is unavailable. One could create a reservation for all of those licenses in order to perform maintenance on that resource. In the example below, we create a reservation for 1000 licenses with the name of "lustre". If there are a total of 1000 lustre licenses configured in this cluster, this reservation will prevent any job specifying the need for needed a lustre license from being scheduled on this cluster during this reservation.

    $ scontrol create reservation starttime=2009-04-06T16:00:00 \
       duration=120 user=root flags=ignore_jobs \
       licenses=lustre:1000
    Reservation created: root_4

    $ scontrol show reservation
    ReservationName=root_4 StartTime=2009-04-06T16:00:00
       EndTime=2009-04-06T18:00:00 Duration=120
       Nodes= NodeCnt=0
       Features=(null) PartitionName=(null)
       Flags=IGNORE_JOBS Licenses=lustre*1000
       Users=root Accounts=(null)

Another mode of operation would be to reserve specific nodes for an indefinite period in order to study problems on those nodes. This could also be accomplished using a SLURM partition specifically for this purpose, but that would fail to capture the maintenance nature of their use.

    $ scontrol create reservation user=root starttime=now \
       duration=infinite flags=maint nodes=sun000
    Reservation created: root_5

    $ scontrol show res
    ReservationName=root_5 StartTime=2009-02-04T16:22:57
       EndTime=2009-02-04T16:21:57 Duration=4294967295
       Nodes=sun000 NodeCnt=1
       Features=(null) PartitionName=(null)
       Flags=MAINT,SPEC_NODES Licenses=(null)
       Users=root Accounts=(null)

Our next example is to reserve ten nodes in the default SLURM partition starting at noon and with a duration of 60 minutes occurring daily. The reservation will be available only to users alan and brenda.

    $ scontrol create reservation user=alan,brenda \
       starttime=noon duration=60 flags=daily nodecnt=10
    Reservation created: alan_6

    $ scontrol show res
    ReservationName=alan_6 StartTime=2009-02-05T12:00:00
       EndTime=2009-02-05T13:00:00 Duration=60
       Nodes=sun[000-003,007,010-013,017] NodeCnt=10
       Features=(null) PartitionName=pdebug
       Flags=DAILY Licenses=(null)
       Users=alan,brenda Accounts=(null)

Reservations can be optimized with respect to system topology if the reservation request includes information about the sizes of jobs to be created. This is especially important for BlueGene systems due to restrictive rules about the topology of created blocks (due to hardware constraints and/or SLURM's configuration). To take advantage of this optimization, specify the sizes of jobs of to be concurrently executed. The example below creates a reservation containing 4096 c-nodes on a BlueGene system so that two 2048 c-node jobs can execute simultaneously.

    $ scontrol create reservation user=alan,brenda \
       starttime=noon duration=60 nodecnt=2k,2k
    Reservation created: alan_8

    $ scontrol show res
    ReservationName=alan_9 StartTime=2011-12-05T12:00:00
       EndTime=2011-12-05T13:00:00 Duration=60
       Nodes=bgp[000x011,210x311] NodeCnt=4096
       Features=(null) PartitionName=pdebug
       Flags= Licenses=(null)
       Users=alan,brenda Accounts=(null)

Note that specific nodes to be associated with the reservation are made immediately after creation of the reservation. This permits users to stage files to the nodes in preparation for use during the reservation. Note that the reservation creation request can also identify the partition from which to select the nodes or _one_ feature that every selected node must contain.

On a smaller system, one might want to reserve specific CPUs rather than whole nodes. While the resolution of SLURM's resource reservation is that of whole nodes, one might configure each CPU as a license to SLURM and reserve those instead (we understand this is a kludge, but it does provide a way to work around this shortcoming in SLURM's code). Proper enforcement then requires that each job request one "cpu" license for each CPU to be allocated, which can be accomplished by an appropriate job_submit plugin. In the example below, we configure the system with one license named "cpu" for each CPU in the system, 64 in this example, then create a reservation for 32 CPUs. The user developed job_submit plugin would then explicitly set the job's licenses field to require one "cpu" for each physical CPU required to satisfy the request.

    $ scontrol show configuration | grep Licenses
    Licenses  = cpu:64

    $ scontrol create reservation starttime=2009-04-06T16:00:00 \
       duration=120 user=bob flags=license_only \
       licenses=cpu:32
    Reservation created: bob_5

## Reservation Use

The reservation create response includes the reservation's name. This name is automatically generated by SLURM based upon the first user or account name and a numeric suffix. In order to use the reservation, the job submit request must explicitly specify that reservation name. The job must be contained completely within the named reservation. The job will be canceled after the reservation reaches its EndTime. If letting the job continue execution after the reservation EndTime, a configuration option ResvOverRun can be set to control how long the job can continue execution.

    $ sbatch --reservation=alan_6 -N4 my.script
    sbatch: Submitted batch job 65540

Note that use of a reservation does not alter a job's priority, but it does act as an enhancement to the job's priority. Any job with a reservation is considered for scheduling to resources before any other job in the same SLURM partition (queue) not associated with a reservation.

## Reservation Modification

Reservations can be modified by user root as desired. For example their duration could be altered or the users granted access changed as shown below:

    $ scontrol update ReservationName=root_3 \
       duration=150 users=admin
    Reservation updated.

    bash-3.00$ scontrol show ReservationName=root_3
    ReservationName=root_3 StartTime=2009-02-06T16:00:00
       EndTime=2009-02-06T18:30:00 Duration=150
       Nodes=ALL NodeCnt=20 Features=(null)
       PartitionName=(null) Flags=MAINT,SPEC_NODES Licenses=(null)
       Users=admin Accounts=(null)

## Reservation Deletion

Reservations are automatically purged after their end time. They may also be manually deleted as shown below. Note that a reservation can not be deleted while there are jobs running in it.

    $ scontrol delete ReservationName=alan_6

## Overlapping Reservations

By default, reservations must not overlap. They must either include different nodes or operate at different times. If specific nodes are not specified when a reservation is created, SLURM will automatically select nodes to avoid overlap and insure that the selected nodes are available when the reservation begins.

There is very limited support for overlapping reservations with two specific modes of operation available. For ease of system maintenance, you can create a reservation with the "maint" flag that overlaps existing reservations. This permits an administrator to easily create a maintenance reservation for an entire cluster without needing to remove or reschedule pre-existing reservations. Users requesting access to one of these pre-existing reservations will be prevented from using resources that are also in this maintenance reservation. For example, users alan and brenda might have a reservation for some nodes daily from noon until 1PM. If there is a maintenance reservation for all nodes starting at 12:30PM, the only jobs they may start in their reservation would have to be completed by 12:30PM, when the maintenance reservation begins.

The second exception operates in the same manner as a maintenance reservation except that is it not logged in the accounting system as nodes reserved for maintenance. It requires the use of the "overlap" flag when creating the second reservation. This might be used to insure availability of resources for a specific user within a group having a reservation. Using the previous example of alan and brenda having a 10 node reservation for 60 minutes, we might want to reserve 4 nodes of that for for brenda during the first 30 minutes of the time period. In this case, the creation of one overlapping reservation (for a total of two reservations) may be simpler than creating three separate reservations, partly since the use of any reservation requires the job specification of the reservation name.

1. A six node reservation for both alan and brenda that lasts the full 60 minutes
2. A four node reservation for brenda for the first 30 minutes
3. A four node reservation for both alan and brenda that lasts for the final 30 minutes

If the "maint" or "overlap" flag is used when creating reservations, one could create a reservation within a reservation within a third reservation. Note a reservation having a "maint" or "overlap" flag will not have resources removed from it by a subsequent reservation also having a "maint" or "overlap" flag, so nesting of reservations only works to a depth of two.

## Reservation Accounting

Jobs executed within a reservation are accounted for using the appropriate user and bank account. If resources within a reservation are not used, those resources will be accounted for as being used by all users or bank accounts associated with the reservation on an equal basis (e.g. if two users are eligible to use a reservation and neither does, each user will be reported to have used half of the reserved resources).

## Future Work

Several enhancements are anticipated at some point in the future.

1. Reservations made within a partition having gang scheduling assumes the highest level rather than the actual level of time-slicing when considering the initiation of jobs. This will prevent the initiation of some jobs which would complete execution before a reservation given fewer jobs to time-slice with.
2. Add support to reserve specific CPU counts rather than require whole nodes be reserved (work around described above).

Last modified 23 May 2012