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⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)

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Proof of concept Slurm support in Nix

Originally in the design of BioNix a choice to implement cluster integration at the level of Nix was made to simplify implementation and maximise reuse of existing tools (the Nix builder). This has lead to a few downsides:

1. only BioNix stages are submitted to the cluster, software building happens directly on the machine running nix;

2. derivations capture platform specific configuration, making it difficult to form ad-hoc remote builders.

The latter prevents forming buildfarms comprising of multiple HPC facilities, as derivations cannot easily pass between them. The solution to these issues is to push Slurm support down into the Nix build core: by submitting builds to the scheduler instead of executing them directly, HPC resources managed through a scheduling system just becomes a specific type of builder.

A proof of concept is avilable:

static-nix

Here it is building some python dependencies in order to do an analysis:

     JOBID PARTITION                                               NAME     USER    STATE       TIME  TIME_LIMI  NODES
   2970825   regular                   pytz-2021.3-py2.py3-none-any.whl   bedo.j  PENDING       0:00 2-00:00:00      1
   2970817   regular                         python3.8-kiwisolver-1.3.1   bedo.j  RUNNING       1:22 2-00:00:00      1
   2970818   regular                          python3.8-pyparsing-3.0.3   bedo.j  RUNNING       1:22 2-00:00:00      1
   2970809   regular                             python3.8-joblib-1.1.0   bedo.j  RUNNING       1:54 2-00:00:00      1
   2970810   regular                             python3.8-numpy-1.20.2   bedo.j  RUNNING       1:54 2-00:00:00      1
   2970811   regular                             python3.8-pillow-8.2.0   bedo.j  RUNNING       1:54 2-00:00:00      1
   2970812   regular                             python3.8-psutil-5.8.0   bedo.j  RUNNING       1:54 2-00:00:00      1
   2970814   regular                               python3.8-xlrd-1.2.0   bedo.j  RUNNING       1:54 2-00:00:00      1