FireHPC is a tool designed to quickly start and setup a tiny emulated HPC cluster based on Linux containers, ready to run non-intensive MPI jobs with Slurm.
Obviously, FireHPC does not aim at performances as you get better performances out of your computer without containers overhead.
The purposes are the following:
- Setup development, CI and tests environment
- Learn tools and software in breakable environment
- Testing and discovering new technologies in isolated environment
FireHPC aims to emulate HPC clusters with multiple distributions. It supports running multiple emulated HPC clusters in parallel on the same host, each cluster running in its dedicated virtual network.
The following services are automatically deployed in the emulated cluster:
- Slurm workload manager
- SlurmDBD accounting with MariaDB backend
- Slurmrestd REST API
- LDAP directory with TLS
- SSH with public keys
- OpenMPI
Additional components can be also be deployed, such as:
- Slurm-web
- Metrics stack with Prometheus, Grafana and Grafana Alloy
FireHPC requires Python >= 3.9.
FireHPC relies on:
systemd-nspawncontainers controlled withsystemd-{networkd,machined}- Ansible automation tool
FireHPC also requires the following community Ansible collections:
They may not be installed within Ansible on your distribution. In this case,
you can install on your system using ansible-galaxy.
Download and install Rackslab packages repository signing keyring:
$ curl -sS https://pkgs.rackslab.io/keyring.asc | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/rackslab.gpg > /dev/null
Create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rackslab.sources:
- For Debian 12 Bookworm:
Types: deb
URIs: https://pkgs.rackslab.io/deb
Suites: bookworm
Components: main
Architectures: amd64
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/rackslab.gpg
- For Debian 13 Trixie:
Types: deb
URIs: https://pkgs.rackslab.io/deb
Suites: trixie
Components: main
Architectures: amd64
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/rackslab.gpg
- For Debian sid:
Types: deb
URIs: https://pkgs.rackslab.io/deb
Suites: sid
Components: main
Architectures: amd64
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/rackslab.gpg
Update packages database:
$ sudo apt update
Install firehpc:
$ sudo apt install firehpc
Add your user in firehpc system group:
$ sudo usermod -a -G firehpc ${USERNAME}
$ curl -s https://hpck.it/keyring.asc | \
sudo gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring=/etc/systemd/import-pubring.gpg --import
gpg: key F2EB7900E8151A0D: public key "HPCk.it team <contact@hpck.it>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1
Start and enable systemd-networkd service:
$ sudo systemctl start systemd-networkd.service
$ sudo systemctl enable systemd-networkd.service
Install systemd-resolved:
$ sudo apt install systemd-resolved
Unfortunarly, there is on ongoing bug #1031236 in Debian
on ifupdown/systemd-resolved automatic integration. One workaround is to
define DNS servers IP addresses and domains in systemd-resolved configuration
file /etc/systemd/resolved.conf. Then restart the service so changes can take
effect:
$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved.service
Fix the order between mymachine and resolve services in /etc/nsswitch.conf
so the mymachines service can resolve IP addresses of container names:
--- a/etc/nsswitch.conf
+++ b/etc/nsswitch.conf
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@
shadow: files systemd sss
gshadow: files systemd
-hosts: files resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns mymachines myhostname
+hosts: files mymachines resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns myhostname
networks: files
protocols: db filesIt is also recommended to increase maximum inotify instances from default 128 to 1024 for instance to avoid weird issues when starting a large number of containers:
# sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances=1024Without this modification, the mymachines service is basically ignored by the
return action on resolve service. For reference, see nss-mymachines(8).
This can be made persistent with:
# echo fs.inotify.max_user_instances=1024 > /etc/sysctl.d/99-firehpc.confDeployment of Debian 13 « trixie » clusters require Ansible core >= 2.16 (for this fix) while RHEL8 target is not supported by Ansible >= 2.17 because of dropped support of Python 3.6 (see ansible support matrix for reference). This means Ansible core 2.16 is the only compatible release if you want to deploy both RHEL8 and Debian 13 « trixie » clusters. The easiest way to satisfy this requirement is to install Ansible from PyPI repository. Create a virtual environment and install ansible with this command:
$ pip install 'ansible-core<2.17' ansible ansible-runner ClusterShellNote
ClusterShell is required in the virtual environment for the NodeSet filters.
For a quick start, copy the simple example RacksDB database:
$ cp /usr/share/doc/firehpc/examples/db/racksdb.yml racksdb.ymlThis file can optionally be modified to add nodes or change hostnames.
With your regular user, run FireHPC with a cluster name and an OS in arguments. For example:
$ firehpc deploy --db racksdb.yml --cluster hpc --os debian12
The available OS are reported by this command:
$ firehpc images
When it is deployed, check the status of the emulated cluster:
$ firehpc status --cluster hpc
This reports the started containers and the randomly generated user accounts.
You can connect to your containers (eg. admin) with this command:
$ firehpc ssh admin.hpc
Connect with a generated user account on the login node:
$ firehpc ssh <user>@login.hpc
Then run MPI job in Slurm job:
[<user>@login ~]$ curl --silent https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mpitutorial/mpitutorial/gh-pages/tutorials/mpi-hello-world/code/mpi_hello_world.c -o helloworld.c
[<user>@login ~]$ export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib64/openmpi/bin # required on rocky8, not on debian11
[<user>@login ~]$ mpicc -o helloworld helloworld.c
[<user>@login ~]$ salloc -N 2
salloc: Granted job allocation 2
[<user>@login ~]$ mpirun helloworld
Hello world from processor cn1.hpc, rank 0 out of 4 processors
Hello world from processor cn1.hpc, rank 1 out of 4 processors
Hello world from processor cn2.hpc, rank 2 out of 4 processors
Hello world from processor cn2.hpc, rank 3 out of 4 processors
You can also try Slurm REST API:
[<user>@login ~]$ export $(scontrol token)
[<user>@login ~]$ curl -H "X-SLURM-USER-NAME: ${USER}" -H "X-SLURM-USER-TOKEN: ${SLURM_JWT}" http://admin:6820/slurm/v0.0.39/nodes
When Slurm-web is enabled, it is available at: http://admin.hpc/
When the metrics stack is enabled, Grafana is available at: http://admin.hpc:3000/
Grafana is setup with a Slurm dashboard showing diagrams of nodes states and job queue by default.
When you are done, you can clean up everything for a cluster with this command:
$ firehpc clean --cluster hpc
FireHPC is developed by Rackslab.
FireHPC is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPLv3+).