# What's New

## Index

- Slurm Version 14.03, March 2014
- Slurm Version 14.11, November 2014
- Slurm Version 15.08 and beyond

## Major Updates in Slurm Version 14.03

Slurm Version 14.03 was released in March 2014. Major enhancements include:

- Added support for native Slurm operation on Cray systems (without ALPS).
- Added partition configuration parameters AllowAccounts, AllowQOS, DenyAccounts and DenyQOS to provide greater control over use.
- Added the ability to perform load based scheduling. Allocating resources to jobs on the nodes with the largest number if idle CPUs.
- Added support for reserving cores on a compute node for system services (core specialization).
- Add mechanism for job_submit plugin to generate error message for srun, salloc or sbatch to stderr.
- Added new structures and support for both server and cluster resources.
- Significant performance improvements, especially with respect to job array support.
- Improved user support for fault-tolerance (e.g. "hot spare" resources).

## Major Updates in Slurm Version 14.11

Slurm Version 14.11 is scheduled for release in November 2014. Major enhancements include:

- Communication gateway nodes to improve scalability.
- Support for heterogeneous generic resources (i.e. user specification of desired GPU types).
- Support for non-consumable generic resources that are shared, but limited in number.
- Support for automatic job requeue policy based on exit value.
- Add user options to set the CPU governor (OnDemand, Performance, PowerSave or UserSpace) in addition to being able to explicitly set the CPU frequency currently available.
- Report Slurm message traffic by user, type, count and time consumed.

## Major Updates in Slurm Version 15.08 and beyond

Detailed plans for release dates and contents of additional Slurm releases have not been finalized. Anyone desiring to perform Slurm development should notify slurm-dev@schedmd.com to coordinate activities. Future development plans includes:

- Integration with FLEXlm (Flexnet Publisher) license management.
- Layouts framework, which will be the basis for further developments toward optimizing scheduling with respect to additional parameters such as temperature and power consumption.
- Energy consumption added as a factor in fair-share scheduling.
- Energy aware scheduling added with respect to power caps.
- Distributed architecture to support the management of resources with Intel MIC processors.
- Support of I/O as a new resources, including proxy I/O nodes with data locality.
- Improved scheduling support for job dependencies (e.g. pre-processing, post-processing, co-processing on I/O nodes, etc.) to optimize overall system utilization.
- IP communications over InfiniBand network for improved performance.
- Fault-tolerance and jobs dynamic adaptation through communication protocol between Slurm , MPI libraries and the application.
- Improved support for high-throughput computing (e.g. multiple slurmctld daemons on a single cluster).
- Scheduling fully optimized for energy efficiency.
- Numerous enhancements to advanced resource reservations (e.g. start or end the reservation early depending upon the workload).
- Add Kerberos credential support including credential forwarding and refresh.
- Improved support for provisioning and virtualization.
- Provide a web-based Slurm administration tool.

Last modified 29 May 2014