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Build a safe learning lab; provision production deliberately

Audience: Authorized administrators · Reviewed: 2026-10-04

Version and teaching scope

Use documentation matching your installed release and local policy. Check sinfo --version; upstream documentation identified itself as 26.05 at review. Paths, partitions, accounts, modules, memory, MPI, GPUs and services are site-specific. Example programs beginning ./ must already exist. These are teaching examples, not a validated deployment recipe or evidence that a cluster was modified. Administrative operations require authorized operators and a reviewed change plan; ordinary users must not execute them or paste them into production.

An isolated learning environment

Start with an isolated test environment containing a controller and one or two compute VMs. A single-host demonstration is possible, but separate VMs make hostname, identity, network, and shared-file failures visible. Use disposable test data and separate authentication secrets. Never connect a lab provisioning DHCP service to an existing institutional network without network-team approval.

A staged deployment plan

  1. Record OS, architecture, kernel/cgroup mode, Slurm release, package source, and rollback method.
  2. Establish name resolution, time synchronization, consistent user IDs, and storage visibility before installing scheduler services.
  3. Install mutually compatible packages from the chosen supported source. Keep package manifests; avoid mixing distribution packages with an unrelated source build.
  4. Configure authentication and a minimal CPU-only partition. Launch a one-task hostname job, then a two-node test.
  5. Add accounting, limits, resource isolation, and monitoring. Test failure behavior before adding GPUs or a production software stack.

OpenHPC and Warewulf have distinct roles

OpenHPC provides integrated packages and installation guides selected by release, OS, architecture, provisioning system, and scheduler. Follow one matching guide rather than combining old CentOS commands with a current Rocky/AlmaLinux image. Warewulf manages node images and overlays; Slurm manages scheduled work after nodes boot. These are complementary responsibilities.

Production rollout and recovery

For production, keep image definitions and non-secret configuration in version control, maintain a protected secret-distribution process, and validate one canary node before a wider rollout. Restrict provisioning endpoints to trusted networks; evaluate the security features available in the exact Warewulf version. Do not “fix” installation problems by disabling firewalls or exposing provisioning and management interfaces publicly.

Acceptance test: Rebuild a test node from its recorded image, verify identity and mounts, run a small job, and demonstrate recovery from a deliberate lab-only node outage.

Official sources

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