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Track 5: Leadership

Audience: L5 (IT Directors, Research Leads, Business Stakeholders) | Modules: 7 | Prerequisites: None

Strategy, capacity planning, and cost allocation for decision-makers evaluating or overseeing HPC infrastructure. No command-line experience required.

Modules

# Module What You'll Learn
1 What is HPC Scheduling? Why shared computing needs a scheduler (non-technical overview)
2 Why Slurm Market position, GPU support, cloud integration, cost model, talent pool
3 Slurm Architecture Technical architecture at a glance (skim for context)
4 Capacity Planning Utilization metrics, sreport, planning strategies, cloud bursting economics
5 Cost Allocation Chargeback/showback, account hierarchy, QOS budgets, cloud cost attribution
6 Accounts & Fairshare How resource allocation and fairshare work (skim for policy context)
7 Policies & Priority Scheduling policies, preemption, reservations (skim for policy context)

After This Track

You can make informed decisions about HPC infrastructure investments, evaluate Slurm vs. alternatives, and understand the reporting tools available for cost management.

Key Questions This Track Answers

  • Why Slurm over other schedulers? Market dominance, cloud support, GPU scheduling, open source
  • How do we track who uses what? Accounts, fairshare, sacct/sreport
  • How do we control costs? QOS budgets, chargeback models, cloud cost attribution
  • When do we need more capacity? Utilization metrics, wait time analysis, planning strategies