Based on the most recent release of the Top500 List, Slurm Workload Manager continues to be the most widely used on the fastest of the fast: 33 per cent of the top 15 supercomputers use the product.
Slurm, an open-source workload manager designed for the most demanding HPC environments, originated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) 10 years ago and has evolved over time with the contributions of more than 100 developers. It remains an important workload manager at LLNL, providing scheduling and other functionality to their Sequoia supercomputer, currently number two in the Top500 and ranked the fastest in the previous Top500 List.
The other supercomputers in the 15 fastest supercomputers using Slurm are Stampede at TACC; Tianhe-1A in China; Curie at the CEA in France; and Helios at Japan’s International Fusion Energy Research Centre. Beyond the top 15 systems, SchedMD, the organisation overseeing the code base for Slurm, estimates that as many as 30 per cent of the supercomputers in the Top500 list are using the open-source workload manager.
'We built Slurm to schedule efficiently resources for the world’s biggest systems and, through simulation, have proven its scalability to an order of magnitude higher than the currently largest systems,' said Moe Jette, CTO of SchedMD. 'It’s now one of the most widely used workload managers in the Top500. As we move to Exascale computing requirements, Slurm is the workload manager best positioned to schedule jobs at that scale.'
Outside of the large supercomputer centres, Slurm is gathering momentum. HPC computer manufacturers Bull and Cray frequently provide Slurm as part of their solutions, and Bright Computing now offers Slurm as the default workload manager in Bright Cluster Manager.
