How to run EnginFrame in Ubuntu on Windows WSL

This guide explains how to get EnginFrame, Neutro and SLURM running inside Ubuntu on Windows. Windows Subsystem for Linux presently supports Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019. In case running on AWS first select the Windows Server 2019 AMI

In the next step we select the instance type (head over to instaguide.io for a great overview of instances and related pricing). In our case we select a t3.large. FYI at the time of writing: WSL 2 is only available in Windows Builds 18917 or higher. We can check the Windows version with the following command: systeminfo | Select-String "^OS Name","^OS Version"

Then we enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL):

and reboot. Now we can install the Linux-distro – in our case Ubuntu 18.04.

In case the Microsoft shop does not work you can download the Ubuntu distribution and others manually based on the list from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-manual. In the case of Ubuntu 18.04 the appx file can be found here: https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-1804.

You can even download the Linux distribution for WSL via commandline – and then install the APPX Linux package:

which will look similar to:

Now you can click on the Windows “Start” button and you can see Ubuntu 18.04 as recently added app:

After starting the Ubuntu setup will ask for a Linux user name and after entering e.g. “nisp” the Ubuntu window should look similar to this in case of Ubuntu 20.04:

You got Ubuntu 20.04 running on Windows!

Or in case you install Ubuntu 18.04 it will look like this:

EnginFrame on Ubuntu in WSL

As next step we install the NICE EnginFrame portal. As Neutro prefers the Java 8 runtime (please see our guide about the NICE Neutro session scheduler installation which you might want to install before EnginFrame for Windows session management) we install EnginFrame on Java 8 as well:

The EnginFrame installation on Ubuntu will at the end complain about the boot startup installation but you can start EnginFrame yourself with /opt/nice/enginframe/bin/enginframe start:

Now EnginFrame is running inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux in Ubuntu 18.04. Below is a screenshot of the related processes in addition to a Neutro session scheduler java process:

After logging into EnginFrame via the standard port 8080 we can find the Neutro host inside the EnginFrame Views host view:

SLURM on WSL

Now we can start the SLURM installation:

To finalize the SLURM configuration we load the config file into your browser from file:///C:/Users/Administrator/configurator.easy.html:

You can mostly use the defaults for the settings on this page. We suggest to make the following adjustments:

1. Make sure the hostname of the system is ControlMachine and NodeName
2. State Preservation: set StateSaveLocation to /var/spool/slurm-llnl
3. Process tracking: use Pgid instead of Cgroup
4. Event logging: this is more of a personal preference as to whether you want the logging to be sent to the standard system log (/var/log/syslog), or if you would like it saved to its own unique file to keep it clearer to read (e.g. /var/log/slurm-llnl/SlurmctldLogFile)

And click “submit” at the end of the page. Now copy what is generated on this page to a new slurm.conf file: cat > /etc/slurm-llnl/slurm.conf

Please verify that your hostname (in case you changed it) is updated in the /etc/hosts file so that SLURM can identify the node.

SLURM on WSL should be up and running well:

In case you want to build SLURM on Ubuntu on WSL:

In this guide we have installed the Windows Subsystem for Linux to host Ubuntu where we can install EnginFrame, NEUTRO Windows session scheduler as well as the SLURM scheduler. The process is very smooth and EnginFrame and NEUTRO are running perfectly inside WSL.

Any questions just let us know.