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Create a Slurm-on-Kubernetes cluster

Deploy a Slurm HPC cluster on top of an existing Kubernetes cluster.

Create a Slurm-on-Kubernetes cluster

This guide walks through deploying a Slurm cluster on top of an existing Kubernetes cluster. Slurm-on-Kubernetes lets you run traditional HPC batch jobs using Kubernetes compute pools as the backing infrastructure.

Prerequisites​

  • A Kubernetes cluster in ready status
  • At least one compute pool on the parent Kubernetes cluster

Create from the Slurm cluster list​

  1. Click Clusters in the left sidebar, then click the Slurm tab.
  2. Click Prepare Cluster.
  3. In the Configure step, select Kubernetes Cluster as the deployment target. A list of ready Kubernetes clusters appears.
  4. Click the target cluster, then click Configure Slurm Cluster.

Create from the Kubernetes detail page​

  1. Click the target Kubernetes cluster name to open its detail page.
  2. Click the Slurm Clusters tab.
  3. Click Create Slurm Cluster.

Configure compute pools and partitions​

From either entry point, the wizard opens with the Compute & Partitions step.

Compute pools​

Two pools are pre-configured: Slurm Controller (control plane) and Compute Workers.

For each pool, configure:

  1. Profile -- select an instance type:
    • AWS parent cluster -- click to open the instance type browser and select any EC2 type (for example, t3.medium or c5n.4xlarge)
    • Non-AWS parent cluster -- choose from Small (4 vCPU, 8 GiB), Medium (8 vCPU, 16 GiB), or Large (16 vCPU, 32 GiB)
  2. GPU -- toggle to enable GPU compute on the pool
  3. Max Nodes -- the upper autoscaling bound (default: 1 for controller, 10 for compute)

Click Add Compute Pool to add additional worker pools. At least one controller pool and one compute pool are required.

Partitions​

A default partition named partition-1 is pre-configured. For each partition:

  1. Set the Partition Name.
  2. Choose which Compute Group it routes to.
  3. Toggle Default status. Only one partition can be default.

Advanced options​

Click Advanced Options to configure TLS, NodePort exposure, job profiling, and the Kubernetes scheduler bridge.

Submit the cluster​

Click Create Slurm Cluster. The wizard shows a three-stage progress stepper:

  1. Registering cluster -- creates the cluster record and provisions a Keycloak client
  2. Creating compute pools -- provisions each pool on the parent Kubernetes cluster
  3. Creating Slurm cluster -- finalizes the Slurm deployment

Wait for all stages to complete. The cluster appears in the Slurm list with ready status.

Submit a test job​

  1. Navigate to Jobs > Scripts and create a simple test script.
  2. Click Actions > Submit Script.
  3. In the Cluster dropdown, select the new Slurm-on-Kubernetes cluster.
  4. Select a partition and click Submit.
  5. Verify the job completes on the Submissions page.
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