The Lua SPANK plugin for Slurm has been originally developed by Mark Grondo at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This is extracted from the LLNL Slurm SPANK plugins project and re-packaged to only provide the LUA SPANK plugin, for easier installation.

Slurm SPANK Lua plugin

The Lua SPANK plugin for Slurm allows Lua scripts to take the place of compiled C shared objects in the Slurm spank(8) framework. All the power of the C SPANK API is exported to Lua via this plugin, which loads one or more scripts and executes Lua functions during the appropriate Slurm phase (as described in the spank(8) manpage).

Installation

Assumptions

To facilitate co-existence with other SPANK plugins, we'll assume that the file defined in PlugStackConfig (by default, /etc/slurm/plugstack.conf) contains something like:

include /etc/slurm/plugstack.conf.d/*.conf

so we can enable the Slurm SPANK Lua plugin by adding a lua.conf file in /etc/slurm/plugstack.conf.d/

RPM-based installation (recommended)

Get the source and build the RPM:

$ REPO=stanford-rc
$ PROJ=slurm-spank-lua
$ VER=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/$REPO/$PROJ/releases/latest | awk '/tag_name/ {gsub(/"|,/,""); print $2}')
$ wget https://github.com/$REPO/$PROJ/archive/${VER}.tar.gz -O slurm-spank-lua-${VER//v}.tar.gz
$ rpmbuild -ta slurm-spank-lua-${VER//v}.tar.gz

Install the generated RPM. For instance (paths, arch and version may vary):

# rpm -Uvh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/slurm-spank-lua-0.38-1.x86_64.rpm

Manual installation

The source can be compiled with:

$ cc -o lua.o -fPIC -c lua.c
$ cc -o lib/list.o -fPIC -c lib/list.c
$ cc -shared -fPIC -o lua.so lua.o lib/list.o -llua

or just:

$ make

Then, the generated lua.so should be placed in /usr/lib/slurm, and lua.conf in /etc/slurm/plugstackconf.d/.

Configuration

The RPM will install a lua.conf file in /etc/slurm/plugstackconf.d/ that contains:

required  lua.so  /etc/slurm/lua.d/*.lua

Then, Lua scripts could simply be dropped in /etc/slurm/lua.d/ to be automatically executed by Slurm.

The RPM provides a demo script, spank_demo.lua, based on the C SPANK demo plugin by Yong Qin. Its goal is simply to demonstrate all the different SPANK functions and the context in which they're called. The plugin does nothing else than logging function calls.

The demo script is installed /etc/slurm/lua.d/disabled/, so it won't be automatically executed. To enable it, one could simply move it to /etc/slurm/lua.d/

Note that both the Slurm SPANK Lua plugin (lua.so) and the Lua scripts will need to be present on both the submission host (the node where srun/sbatch commands are executed) and the execution host(s) (the compute nodes).

Writing your own Lua scripts

For more info about how the Slurm SPANK Lua plugin works, and how to write your own Lua scripts, see the man page (man 8 spank-lua).

Other useful information sources:

• Slurm SPANK documentation: https://slurm.schedmd.com/spank.html
• SPANK functions and variables are defined in spank.h