Slurm based Cluster

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Slurm is the most popular open-source workload manager for Linux clusters released under GNU GPL v2. As a cluster manager, slurm is widely used all over the world, from academic circles to industrial areas. On one hand, it virtualizes the physically individual computing nodes as a supercomputer whereby the procedure and method of visiting resources can be greatly simplified. On other hand, it provides automatic job submission/queuing/scheduling/executing, as well as results collection.

Slurm is comprised of 3 daemons.

slurmctld is the controller daemon running on server.
slurmdbd is an optional but recommended daemon for database-based storage and statistics running on server. E.g., MySQL/mariadb can be installed.
slurmd is a client daemon running on each computing node.

PBS and Maui based Cluster

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Portable batch system (PBS) was originally developed by NASA, which is comprised of a resource manager, a scheduler and a client. What is different, a resource manager and a scheduler are usually running on server side, while clients running on computing nodes. For the softwares, both commercial PBS Pro and open-source Torque are available. But herein, we consider the open-source Torque only.

Just as their names indicate, a resource manager targets for resource management and configuration, responsible for checking the availability of resource, e.g. CPU, memory, etc., and resource assignment; a scheduler accept jobs from subscribers and maintains one or more queues.

The built-in scheduler is a simple FIFO scheduler. However, other schedulers can be adopted instead. For instance, Maui is a very popular and powerful scheduler, based on which advanced and complex strategies can be realized and customized.

Cluster on Shaka

Slurm based Cluster

Introduction

PBS and Maui based Cluster

Introduction