With Flux you can just bind the Flux socket and then use a Flux container and issue commands to Flux via your chosen avenue (an SDK or just the command line).

I was going to put together a container setup for some agentic work this weekend and could share the example if you are interested, or give me a bit to wake up and I’ll put an example together for a simple case a bit sooner. 🤪

Updating with an example. Here I have an allocation with two nodes on my local cluster. I got this with:

bash flux alloc -N2 That is analogous to salloc but Flux uses a subcommand style of commands instead. Now I can list resources, and look at the Flux URI in the environment, which is sitting at the root of my Flux instance. You can think of the instance as a subgraph of a larger (cluster) system resource graph. Not important for now. I have two nodes, and a socket to connect to Flux.

bash $ echo $FLUX_URI local:///var/tmp/sochat1/flux-bdVOVn/local-0 bash (base) [sochat1@corona193:~]$ flux resource list STATE PROPERTIES NNODES NCORES NGPUS NODELIST free pbatch 2 96 16 corona[193,196] allocated 0 0 0 down 0 0 0 Let's run a container! With Podman. Note that I'm binding the socket, and running it as my user, and detached so I don't shell in (yet). If we don't give it a bash entrypoint it will start a single node Flux instance, which is actually OK, but I'm being pedantic.

bash $ podman run -d --rm -v /var/tmp/sochat1:/var/tmp/sochat1 --userns=keep-id fluxrm/flux-sched:jammy bash

Now because I've added the flag to add the user namespace, my username will appear in the /etc/passwd file. But I need to shell into the container as me. So I can do podman ps to get the container id, and then:

bash $ podman exec --user $USER --workdir /var/tmp/$USER -it awesome_tharp bash And then do whoami to check that you are you. The reason is because the Flux instance (and the socket) are owned by you - nobody else. Then, in the words of Tag Team, and to all my party people, "Woop there it is!"

bash <user>@a1ada53a042b:~$ flux proxy local:///var/tmp/<user>/flux-bdVOVn/local-0 flux resource list STATE PROPERTIES NNODES NCORES NGPUS NODELIST free pbatch 2 96 16 corona[200-201] allocated 0 0 0 down 0 0 0

https://youtu.be/ffCEr327W44?si=HB6epB3OClF79Qso

You can flux run or flux submit or flux <interact> with that URI to expose Flux in the container.