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User Roles
Users of Gurobi Remote Services will fall into one of four possible roles: system administrator, administrator, standard user, or read-only user. The system administrator is in charge of setting up the cluster, adding and removing nodes, etc. Administrators monitor usage of the cluster. They can monitor the length of the server queue, kill jobs, etc. Standard users are the programs running on client machines that ultimately submit jobs or batches to the cluster. Read-only users can only monitor jobs submitted by other users.
The Gurobi distribution includes a number of tools that are relevant to the people in these roles. These are all covered in much more detail later on, but we will briefly describe how they fit with the various roles here.
The system administrator installs and manages a Remote Services cluster and the different components. Gurobi Remote Services provides the following tools to help with this:
- grb_rs is the program that runs on the Compute Server and Distributed Worker nodes. The system administrator will need to configure and start it on all of the nodes of a Remote Services cluster.
- grb_rsm is the program that runs the Cluster Manager. The system administrator will need to configure and start it on one or more machines, as needed. The system administrator will also need to set up the Database and configure its connection.
- grbcluster is used to issue commands to an already-running cluster. Examples of system administrator commands include adding or removing nodes, and enabling or disabling job processing on a cluster. This tool provides a number of commands; type grbcluster —help for a full list.
- Finally, most of the important responsibilities of the system administrator, including user management and cluster health monitoring, can also be performed through the Web User Interface of the Cluster Manager.
For more details, please refer to the section on setting up and administering a cluster.
An administrator monitors and manages the flow of jobs through a Remote Services cluster. Examples of administrator commands include aborting jobs, changing cluster parameters and checking licenses. The primary tool for doing so is grbcluster. You can get a full list of available commands by typing grbcluster —help. All of these functions are also exposed in the Web User Interface of the Cluster Manager.
A Remote Services client submits jobs or batches to the cluster. This is done through a user application or through the Gurobi command-line tool gurobi_cl (which is documented in the Gurobi Command-Line Tool section of the Gurobi Reference Manual). Submitting a job to a Remote Services cluster is typically just a matter of running the appropriate program. We will provide a simple example in the next section.
Clients can also use the grbcluster command to monitor the state of their jobs and of the Remote Services queue. Example commands include listing active jobs, listing recently executed jobs, displaying the log of a recent job, etc. You can get a full list of available commands by typing grbcluster —help. grbcluster can also be used to submit batches.
Finally, clients can access the Web User Interface of the Cluster Manager. All of the functions provided by grbcluster are available in the web application, including submitting batches using a drag-and-drop interface.
Read-only users can only monitor optimization tasks. They can list jobs and batches, access history, display the log of a job, etc. They are not allowed to submit jobs or batches to the cluster, nor can they abort jobs.
