Slurm Workload Manager


The Slurm Workload Manager, or Slurm, is a free and open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels, used by many of the world's supercomputers and computer clusters.
It provides three key functions:
Slurm is the workload manager on about 60% of the TOP500 supercomputers.
Slurm uses a best fit algorithm based on Hilbert curve scheduling or fat tree network topology in order to optimize locality of task assignments on parallel computers.

History

Slurm began development as a collaborative effort primarily by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, SchedMD, Linux NetworX, Hewlett-Packard, and Groupe Bull as a Free Software resource manager. It was inspired by the closed source Quadrics RMS and shares a similar syntax. The name is a reference to the soda in Futurama. Over 100 people around the world have contributed to the project. It has since evolved into a sophisticated batch scheduler capable of satisfying the requirements of many large computer centers.
, TOP500 list of most powerful computers in the world indicates that Slurm is the workload manager on six of the top ten systems including the Sunway TaihuLight with 10,649,600 computing cores.

Structure

Slurm's design is very modular with about 100 optional plugins. In its simplest configuration, it can be installed and configured in a couple of minutes. More sophisticated configurations provide database integration for accounting, management of resource limits and workload prioritization.

Notable features

Notable Slurm features include the following:
The following features are announced for version 14.11 of Slurm, was released in November 2014:
Slurm is primarily developed to work alongside Linux distributions, although there is also support for a few other POSIX-based operating systems, including BSDs. Slurm also supports several unique computer architectures, including:
Slurm is available under the GNU General Public License v2.

Commercial support

In 2010, the developers of Slurm founded SchedMD, which maintains the canonical source, provides development, level 3 commercial support and training services. Commercial support is also available from Bright Computing, Bull, Cray, and Science + Computing.