It sounds like you are asking if there should be a shared /home, which
you do not need. You do need to ensure a user can access the environment
for the node (a home directory, ssh keys, etc).
If you are asking about the job binary and the data it will be
processing, again, you do not. You could, for example, install the
binary on all the nodes.
If your job fetches its own data to work on (say a script that will
download/prep .grib files and then run wrf) then there is no need for a
shared filesystem.
You will, of course, need to stage the results out somewhere as well to
access them outside the cluster.
Brian Andrus
On 6/19/2020 5:04 AM, David Baker wrote:
Hello,
We are currently helping a research group to set up their own Slurm
cluster. They have asked a very interesting question about Slurm and
file systems. That is, they are posing the question -- do you need a
shared user file store on a Slurm cluster?
So, in the extreme case where this is no shared file store for users
can slurm operate properly over a cluster? I have seen commands like
sbcast to move a file from the submission node to a compute node,
however that command can only transfer one file at a time. Furthermore
what would happen to the standard output files? I'm going to guess
that there must be a shared file system, however it would be good if
someone could please confirm this.
Best regards,
David
