Slinky

A few weeks ago I built a Slurm GPU cluster from scratch on bare EC2 and fine-tuned Qwen3-4B across two g6.12xlarge nodes. This post runs the same Slurm fine-tune — but using the Slinky operator on Amazon EKS. Slinky is an open-source project for running Slurm inside Kubernetes: a Kubernetes operator, with custom controllers and CRDs, that manages the lifecycle of a Slurm cluster and its NodeSets as native Kubernetes resources. The point is to get the best of both worlds: combining Slurm’s deterministic, fine-grained batch scheduling with Kubernetes’ dynamic resource allocation and rapid scaling. ...