Skip to content

Quickstart: Over-Quota and Bin Packing

Goals

The goal of this Quickstart is to explain the concepts of over-quota and bin-packing (consolidation) and how they help in maximizing cluster utilization:

  • Show the simplicity of resource provisioning, and how resources are abstracted from users.
  • Show how the system eliminates compute bottlenecks by allowing teams/users to go over their resource quota if there are free GPUs in the cluster.

Setup and configuration:

To complete this Quickstart, the Platform Administrator will need to provide you with:

  • Your cluster should have 4 GPUs on 2 machines with 2 GPUs each.
  • Researcher access to two Projects named "team-a" and "team-b"
  • Each project should be assigned an exact quota of 2 GPUs.
  • A URL of the Run:ai Console. E.g. https://acme.run.ai.

  • Run:ai CLI installed on your machine. There are two available CLI variants:

    • The older V1 CLI. See installation here
    • A newer V2 CLI, supported with clusters of version 2.18 and up. See installation here

Login

Run runai login and enter your credentials.

Part I: Over-quota

Open a terminal and run the following command:

runai submit a2 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 2 -p team-a
runai submit a1 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 1 -p team-a
runai submit b1 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 1 -p team-b

runai training submit a2 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 2 -p team-a
runai training submit a1 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 1 -p team-a
runai training submit b1 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 1 -p team-b

System status after run: overquota1

Discussion

  • team-a has 3 GPUs allocated. Which is over its quota by 1 GPU.
  • The system allows this over-quota as long as there are available resources
  • The system is at full capacity with all GPUs utilized.

Part 2: Basic Fairness via Preemption

Run the following command:

runai submit b2 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 1 -p team-b

runai training submit b2 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 1 -p team-b

System status after run: overquota2

Discussion

  • team-a can no longer remain in over-quota. Thus, one Job, must be preempted: moved out to allow team-b to grow.
  • Run:ai scheduler chooses to preempt Job a1.
  • It is important that unattended Jobs will save checkpoints. This will ensure that whenever Job a1 resume, it will do so from where it left off.

Part 3: Bin Packing

Run the following command:

runai delete job a2 -p team-a

runai training delete a2

a1 is now going to start running again.

Run:

runai list jobs -A

runai training list -A

You have two Jobs that are running on the first node and one Job that is running alone the second node.

Choose one of the two Jobs from the full node and delete it:

runai delete job <job-name> -p <project>

runai training delete <job-name> -p <project>

The status now is: overquota3

Now, run a 2 GPU Job:

runai submit a2 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 2 -p team-a

runai training submit a2 -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 2 -p team-a

_ The status now is: overquota4

Discussion

Note that Job a1 has been preempted and then restarted on the second node, to clear space for the new a2 Job. This is bin-packing or consolidation