Stable release 16.05.9 Development status active Operating system | Preview release 17.02.0-0rc1 Written in C | |
Repository github.com/SchedMD/slurm.git | ||
The Slurm Workload Manager (formerly known as Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management or SLURM), 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. First, it allocates exclusive and/or non-exclusive access to resources (computer nodes) to users for some duration of time so they can perform work. Second, it provides a framework for starting, executing, and monitoring work (typically a parallel job such as MPI) on a set of allocated nodes. Finally, it arbitrates contention for resources by managing a queue of pending jobs.
Contents
Slurm is the workload manager on about 60% of the TOP500 supercomputers, including Tianhe-2 that, until 2016, was the world's fastest computer.
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.
As of November 2015, TOP500 list of most powerful computers in the world indicates that Slurm is the workload manager on six of the top ten systems. Some of the systems in the top ten running Slurm include Tianhe-2, a 33.86 PetaFlop system at NUDT; IBM Sequoia, an IBM Bluegene/Q with 1.57 million cores and 17.2 Petaflops at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Piz Daint, a 7.78 PetaFlop Cray computer at Swiss National Supercomputing Centre; Stampede, a 5.17 PetaFlop Dell computer at the Texas Advance Computing Center; and Vulcan, a 4.29 Petaflop IBM Bluegene/Q at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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:
Supported platforms
Slurm is primarily developed to work alongside Linux distributions, although there is also support for a few other POSIX-based operating systems, including BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD). Slurm also supports several unique computer architectures, including:
License
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