What is Slurm and how could it benefit your business?
When running high-performance workloads, efficiency is key to saving time and costs. Whilst there are many things you can do to boost productivity on the hardware side, there are systems which can help even further.
Slurm is an open-source cluster management and job scheduling system designed to help your HPC workflows run in the most efficient way possible. Essentially, this software maximises the work your cluster of devices can perform and provides features such as job submission, queueing, and resource management.
Its three core functions are:
Allocating computer node access (exclusive or non-exclusive) to users for a duration of time, so they can perform work
Providing a single framework for starting, executing and monitoring working on the set of allocated nodes
Arbitrating resource contention by managing a queue of pending jobs
Each computer node acts as a remote shell, whose primary function is to wait for a job, execute that job and return its status. Nodes and jobs can be monitored via a centralised manager, and a back-up manager can be set up optionally to take over these responsibilities in the event of a failure.
Slurm is a popular choice of software because of its high configurability, scalability, and fault-tolerance. If you’ve never used a job scheduling system before, you can also benefit from extensive documentation and support from an active community of users.
Its flexibility allows it to be applied for a range of use cases, including:
AI and Machine Learning
Training AI and Machine Learning models can be incredibly expensive if managed incorrectly. A job scheduler like Slurm is built to process large-scale data and schedule jobs in the most efficient way possible. This makes it apt for managing your AI workloads effectively, which saves you time and money.
High-Performance Computing (HPC)
In the same vein, if your workload requires significant computational resource, Slurm can distribute it across multiple nodes to maximise efficiency. This makes it perfect for high-performance jobs such as simulation and modelling.
Data analysis
Finally, Slurm is apt for processing and analysing massive datasets. Research institutions and enterprise businesses in particular could use Slurm to eliminate bottlenecks in data analysis, helping keep projects on budget or assisting with data-driven decision making.
Want to know more? You can find further resources on job schedulers and high-performance servers here. Or, if you think Slurm could benefit your business, feel free to get in touch with one of our experts.