RELEASE NOTES FOR SLURM VERSION 1.4
15 January 2009 (after SLURM 1.4.0-pre7 released)


IMPORTANT NOTE:
SLURM state files in version 1.4 are different from those of version 1.3.
After installing SLURM version 1.4, plan to restart without preserving 
jobs or other state information. While SLURM version 1.3 is still running, 
cancel all pending and running jobs (e.g.
"scancel --state=pending; scancel --state=running"). Then stop and restart 
daemons with the "-c" option or use "/etc/init.d/slurm startclean".

There are substantial changes in the slurm.conf configuration file. It 
is recommended that you rebuild your configuration file using the tool
doc/html/configurator.html that comes with the distribution.

HIGHLIGHTS
* Idle nodes can now be completely powered down when idle and automatically
  restarted when their is work available. For more information see:
  https://computing.llnl.gov/linux/slurm/power_save.html
* SLURM has been modified to allocate specific cores to jobs and job steps in
  order to effectively preempt or gang schedule jobs.
* A new configuration parameter, PrologSlurmctld, can be used to support the 
  booting of different operating systems for each job.
* Preemption of jobs from lower priority partitions in order to execute jobs
  in higher priority partitions is now supported. The jobs from the lower 
  priority partition will resume once preempting job completes. 
* Time format of all SLURM command set to ISO 8601 (yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss)
  unless the configure option "--disable-iso8601" is used at build time.
* Support added for Sun Constellation system with optimized resource allocation
  for a 3-dimensional torus interconnect.
* Support added for IBM BlueGene/P systems.

CONFIGURATION FILE CHANGES (see "man slurm.conf" for details)
* DefMemPerTask has been removed. Use DefMemPerCPU or DefMemPerNode instead.
* Added new node state of "FUTURE". These node records are created in SLURM
  tables for future use without a reboot of the SLURM daemons, but are not
   reported by any SLURM commands or APIs.
* Default AuthType is now "auth/munge" rather than auth/none.
* Default CryptoType is now "crypto/munge". OpenSSL is no longer required by
  SLURM in the default configuration.
* BatchStartTime has been added to control how long to wait for a batch job
  to start (complete Prolog, load environment for Moab, etc.).
* CompleteTime has been added to control how long to wait for a job's 
  completion before allocating already released resources to pending jobs.
* OverTimeLimit added to permit jobs to exceed their (soft) time limit by a
  configurable amount. Backfill scheduling will be based upon the soft time
  limit.
* DebugFlags added to provide detailed logging for specific subsystems.
* PrologSlurmctld has been aded and can be used to boot nodes into a particular
  state for each job.

COMMAND CHANGES (see man pages for details)
* --task-mem and --job-mem options have been removed from salloc sbatch and
  srun. Use --mem-per-cpu or --mem instead.
* --ctrl-comm-ifhn-addr option has been removed from the srun command (it is 
  no longer useful).

ACCOUNTING CHANGES
* Added ability for slurmdbd to archive and purge step and/or job records.
* Added support for Workload Characterization Key (WCKey) in accounting 
  records. This is an optional string that can be used to identify the type of
  work being performed (in addition to user ID, account name, job name, etc.).

OTHER CHANGES
* Modify PMI_Get_clique_ranks() to return an array of integers rather
  than a char * to satisfy PMI standard. Correct logic in
  PMI_Get_clique_size() for when srun --overcommit option is used.
