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

📅 2026-03-30
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
📄 PDF
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the lack of a secure, efficient, and compatible programmatic interface in existing Slurm schedulers, which hinders integration with scientific tools and automation systems. We propose Palmetto API, a lightweight RESTful proxy for slurmrestd that introduces, for the first time, fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) and HTTP response caching while maintaining full compatibility with existing clients. This design significantly enhances interface security and performance, effectively reducing latency from redundant requests. Compatibility validation confirms seamless interoperability with the current Slurm ecosystem, enabling straightforward adoption without disrupting established workflows.

Technology Category

Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: SchedulingHumans and AI: Intelligent User InterfacesMachine Learning: Hardware-aware ML

Application Category

Security and Privacy: Authentication, authorization, and access controlSystems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environmentsSearch and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines
📝 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.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Slurm REST API
granular permissions
caching
compatibility
cluster scheduler
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

granular permissions
caching
Slurm REST API
proxy
compatibility
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
B
Ben Godfrey
Research Computing and Data, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, USA
D
Doug Dawson
Research Computing and Data, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, USA