Building the Palmetto API: Adding granular permissions and caching to the Slurm REST API without sacrificing compatibility

TL;DR

This paper presents the Palmetto API, a secure proxy for Slurm's REST API that adds granular permissions and caching, improving performance and security without losing compatibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel proxy solution that enhances Slurm's REST API with advanced features while maintaining compatibility with existing clients.

Findings

Caching improves response times significantly.

The proxy maintains full compatibility with existing slurmrestd clients.

Enhanced security features enable granular permissions.

Abstract

The development of administrative and computational research tools requires reliable programmatic interfaces with the cluster scheduler. The Research Computing and Data (RCD) team at Clemson University has developed the Palmetto API, a proxy for the native Slurm RESTful interface, slurmrestd, while providing advanced authentication, authorization, and caching. This paper details the design and implementation of this proxy, evaluates the performance benefits from caching, and verifies compatibility to existing slurmrestd clients. The result is a light-weight and secure method of exposing our cluster scheduler to tools and automations.