Admin Menus

When you log in with an admin account, you will see an additional Administration menu in the bottom left sidebar. User information registered in Backend.AI is listed in the Users tab. In the case of domain admin, users belong to the domain can be only be listed, while superadmin can see all user information. Only superadmin can create and deactivate a user.

User management page

Create and update user

A user can be created by clicking the CREATE USER button. Note that the password must be longer or equal to 8 characters and at least 1 alphabet/special character/ number should be included.

Create user dialog

Check if the user is created.

User management page

Click the green button in the Controls column for more detailed user information. You can also check the domain and group information where the user belongs.

Detailed information of a user

Click the gear icon in the Controls column to update information of a user who already exist. User’s name, password, activation state, and etc. can be changed.

User update dialog

Deactivate user account

Deleting user accounts is not allowed even for superadmins, to track usage statistics per user, metric retention, and accidental account loss. Instead, admins can deactivate user accounts to keep users from logging in. Click the trash icon in the Controls column. A dialog asking confirmation appears, and you can deactivate the user by clicking the OKAY button.

Deactivating user account

Deactivated users are not listed in Users tab.

Manage User’s Keypairs

Each user account usually have one or more keypairs. A keypair is used for API authentication to the Backend.AI server, after user logs in. Login requires authentication via user email and password, but every request the user sends to the server is authenticated based on the keypair.

A user can have multiple key pairs, but to reduce users the burden of managing keypair, we are currently using only one of user’s keypairs to send requests. Also, when you create a new user, a keypair is automatically created, so you do not need to create and assign a keypair manually in most cases.

Keypairs can be listed on the Credentials tab of in the Users page. Active keypairs are shown immediately, and to see the inactive keypairs, click the Inactive panel at the bottom.

Credential list page

Like in Users tab, you can use the buttons in the Controls column to view or update keypair details. Click the blue trash button to disable that key pair, or click the red trash button to completely delete the keypair. However, if you have created a compute session using a key pair, you cannot delete it. If you accidentally deleted a keypair, you can re-create keypair for the user by clicking the ADD CREDENTIAL button at the upper right corner. If necessary, you can also explicitly enter the access key and secret key by clicking the Advanced panel.

The Rate Limit field is where you specify the maximum number of requests that can be sent to the Backend.AI server in 15 minutes. For example, if set to 1000, and the keypair sends more than 1000 API requests in 15 minutes, and the server throws an error and does not accept the request. It is recommended to use the default value and increase it when the API request frequency goes up high according to the user’s pattern.

Add keypair dialog

Manage Resource Policy

Resource policies can be listed and modified in Resource Policies tab on the Users page. Resource policies allow you to set maximum allowed resources and/or other compute session related settings per keypair basis. If necessary, multiple resource policies can be created, for example, user / research purposes, and apply them separately to each keypair.

Note

To set resource policies at the domain and group level, you have to use Manager Hub, a UI for superadmin only. In the Console UI, you can only set resource policies based on keypairs. Manager Hub is part of the enterprise version.

Resource policy page

In the example image above, there is one resource policy named default. You can change the resource policy by clicking the settings icon in the Control column. After changing the settings, click UPDATE to save.

Update resource policy dialog

The meaning of each field is as follows.

  • CPU: The maximum number of CPU cores that a keypair can use. For example, if set to 4, keypairs bound to the resource policy cannot assign more than 4 cores to the container. Note that the number of cores is limited based on the sum of all containers created by the keypair. If one container allocates three cores, a new container can only allocate one core. In addition, if you check Unlimited, the keypair can allocate resources as much as the server permits. This also applies to other resource settings.
  • RAM: Maximum memory.
  • GPU: The maximum number of physical GPUs that can be allocated. Used only when the GPU provisioning mode of the Backend.AI server is set to “device”.
  • fGPU: The maximum number of virtualized GPUs that can be allocated. Used only when the GPU provisioning mode of the Backend.AI server is set to “shares”. The unit of fGPU is independent of the number of physical GPU devices, and is determined by the streaming multiprocessor (SM) and GPU memory unit set by the server.
  • Container per session: Maximum number of containers a session can have. This is a setting which will be used to bundle multiple containers and use them as a single session. The ability to bundle multiple containers is under development and is currently not used.
  • Idle timeout: If a running session is not used for the time specified in the idle timeout, the session is automatically garbage collected (destroyed). You can set the time interval here. For example, if set to 600, sessions with no usage for 10 minutes are automatically destroyed. If set to 0 or checked Unlimited, garbage collection is not performed for the session created by the keypair.
  • Concurrent Jobs: The maximum number of sessions a user can create concurrently. If set to 5, a keypair using that policy cannot create more than 5 compute sessions.
  • Allowed hosts: Used to control the accessible storage and/or NFS hosts from a session when multiple storage/NFS hosts are available. Even if a NFS is mounted and can be used from Backend.AI, a user will not be able to use that host unless specified here. However, the NFS host may be accessible in case the host is configured to be accessible in the domain and/or group level. Domain / group level settings are possible in Manager Hub.
  • Capacity: This is where you set the maximum available storage size. The disk size limit is only available under certain circumstances and is currently not supported. This feature is under active development, and will be supported in the near future.
  • Max. #: The maximum number of storage folders that can be created.

You can create a new resource policy by clicking the CREATE POLICY button. Each setting value is the same as described above.

To create a resource policy and associate it with a keypair, go to the Credentials tab of the Users page, click the settings button located in the Controls column of the desired keypair, and click the Select Policy field to choose it.

Manage Images

Admins can manage images, which are used in creating a compute session, in the Images tab of the Environments page. In the tab, meta information of all images currently in the Backend.AI server is displayed. You can check information such as registry, namespace, image name, image’s based distros, digest, and minimum resources required for each image. For images downloaded to one or more agent nodes, a check mark is displayed on the left. An unchecked image means that it is not installed on any agent.

Note

The feature to install images by selecting specific agents is currently under development.

Image list page

You can change the minimum resource requirements for each image by clicking the settings icon in the Controls column. Each image has hardware and resource requirements for minimal operation. (For example, for GPU-only images, there must be a minimum allocated GPU.) The default value for the minimum resource amount is provided as embedded in the image’s metadata. If an attempt is made to create a compute session with a resource that is less than the amount of resources specified in each image, the request is automatically adjusted to the minimum resource requirements for the image and then generated, not canceled.

Warning

Don’t change the minimum resource requirements to an amount less than the predefined value! The minimum resource requirements included in the image metadata are values that have been tested and determined. If you are not really sure about the minimum amount of resources you want to change, leave it in the default.

Update image resource setting

Manager docker registry

You can click on the Registries tab in Environments page to see the information of the docker registry that are currently connected to. index.docker.io is registered by default, and it is a registry provided by Docker.

Note

In the offline environment, the default Docker registry is not accessible, so click the trash icon on the right to delete it.

Click the refresh icon in Controls to update image metadata for Backend.AI from the connected registry.AI. Image information which does not have labels for Backend.AI among the images stored in the registry is not updated.

Registries page

You can add your own private docker registry by clicking the ADD REGISTRY button. Note that Registry Hostname and Registry URL address must be set identically, and in the case of Registry URL, a scheme such as http:// or https:// must be explicitly attached. Also, images stored in the registry must have a name prefixed with Registry Hostname. Username and Password are optional and can be filled in if you set separate authentication settings in the registry.

Note

In the case of index.docker.io, the Hostname and Registry URL are different, because Docker internally handles an exception for the default registry. If it is not the default registry, you must match the Hostname and Registry URL to properly connect.

Add registry dialog

Even if you created a registry and update meta information, users cannot use the images in the registry, immediately. Just as you had to register allowed hosts to use the storage host, you must register the registry in the allowed docker registries field at the domain or group level, after registering the registry, so that users in the domain or group can access the registry image. Allowed docker registries can be registered using the Manager Hub with domain and group management. The ability to set allowed docker registries in the keypair’s resource policy is not yet provided.

Manage resource preset

The following predefined resource presets are displayed in the Resource allocation panel when creating a compute session. Superadmin can manage these resource presets.

Resource presets in compute session launch dialog

Go to the Resource Presets tab on the Environment page. You can check the list of currently defined resource presets.

Resource presets tab

You can set resources such as CPU, RAM, fGPU, and etc. to be provided by the resource preset by clicking the settings icon (cogwheel) in the Controls column. In the example below, the GPU field is disabled since the GPU provision mode of the Backend.AI server is set to “fractional”. After setting the resources with the desired values, save it and check if the corresponding preset is displayed when creating the compute session. If you can only allocate resources less than the amount of resources defined in the preset, the corresponding preset would not be printed.

Modify resource preset dialog

Query agent nodes

Superadmins can view the list of agent worker nodes, currently connected to Backend.AI, by visiting the Resources page. You can check agent node’s IP, connecting time, actual resources currently in use, and etc. The Console does not provide the ability to manipulate agent nodes.

Agent node list

On Terminated tab, you can check the information of the agents that has been connected once and then terminated or disconnected. It can be used as a reference for node management.

Terminated agent node list

Manage resource group

Agents can be grouped into units called resource (scaling) groups. For example, let’s say there are 3 agents with V100 GPUs and 2 agents with P100 GPUs. You want to expose two types of GPUs to users separately, then you can group three V100 agents into one resource group, and the remaining two P100 agents into another resource group.

Adding a specific agent to a specific resource group is not currently handled in the UI, and it can be done by editing agent config file from the installation location and restart the agent daemon. Management of the resource groups is possible in Scaling Group tab of the Resource page.

Resource group tab

You can edit a resource group by clicking the settings icon in the Control column. In the Select scheduler field, you can choose the scheduling method for creating a compute session. Currently, there are three types: FIFO, LIFO, and DRF. FIFO and LIFO are scheduling methods creating the first- or the last-enqueued compute session in the job queue. DRF stands for Dominant Resource Fairness, and it aims to provide resources as faie as possible for each users. You can deactivate a resource policy by turning off Active Status.

Modify resource group dialog

You can create a new resource policy by clicking the CREATE button.

System settings

In the System Settings page, you can see main settings set in Backend.AI server. Currently, it provides several controls which can change settings and setting list features.

Note

We will continue to add broader range of setting controls.

Server management

Go to the Maintenance page and you will see some buttons to manage the server.

  • RECALCULATE USAGE: Occasionally, due to unstable network connections or container management problem of Docker daemon, there may be a case where the resource occupied by Backend.AI does not match the resource actually used by the container. In this case, click the RECALCULATE USAGE button to manually correct the resource occupancy.
  • RESCAN IMAGES: Update image meta information from all registered Docker registries. It can be used when a new image is pushed to a Backend.AI-connected docker registry.
Maintenance page

Note

We will continue to add other settings needed for management, such as removing unused images or registering periodic maintenance schedules.