Slurm is not a machine that attaches and stays; it is a queue somebody else
owns. So nothing here submits a node to it. It submits a job whose payload is an
ordinary worker dialling back in, and everything downstream — the protocol, the
artifacts, cancellation, the books — already worked and did not have to learn
what Slurm is.
The alternative, which Covalent takes, is to stage a serialized call and a
runner onto the login node, poll squeue and copy the result back: a second way
of running a node beside the one that exists. The cost of not doing that is one
assumption, that a compute node can open a connection outward. Where that is
false, _payload is the single method a staged variant would replace.
Clusters are configured in provisioners.json beside the alerts, since this is
infrastructure an operator writes rather than anything a flow says. The script
is generated with the system ssh and no new dependency, and prerun owns the
environment — deliberately no pip install, because what is on a cluster is
somebody's decision.
One outstanding request per profile, cancelled if it never attaches and on the
way out. Nothing autoscales.
The run gate needed the same hook: a run held before it starts never reaches the
placer's own wait, so it would have queued forever on a machine nothing had
asked for.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01A6HeySA27EkGANZN95QySW
stroblmeandClaude Opus 5
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