# What's New

## Index

- SLURM Version 2.3, September 2011
- SLURM Version 2.4, June 2012
- SLURM Version 2.5, scheduled for November 2012
- SLURM Version 2.6 and beyond
- Security Patches

## Major Updates in SLURM Version 2.3

SLURM Version 2.2 was released in September 2011. Major enhancements include:

- Support for Cray XT and XE computers (integration with ALPS/BASIL).
- Support for BlueGene/Q computers (partially implemented).
- Support for multiple front-end nodes running slurmd daemons (for Cray and BlueGene architectures, improves performance and fault tolerance).
- Support for Linux cgroup job containers including integration with generic resources.
- Support for growing job allocations (support for shrinking jobs was added in version 2.2).

## Major Updates in SLURM Version 2.4

SLURM Version 2.4 was release in June 2012. Major enhancements include:

- Major improvement in job throuhgput: Up to 500 jobs per second (actual throughput depends upon configuration, hardware, etc.).
- Support for BlueGene/Q computers (fully implemented).
- Resource reservations with a node count specification will select those nodes optimized for the system topology.
- Support for job and step constraints with resource counts (e.g. a job request for two nodes with a feature of "Intel" plus four nodes with a feature of "AMD").
- New tool sdiag reports scheduling statistics.
- Support for SLURM commands operating over a LoadLeveler resource manager (in branch of SLURM code, not in main release).

## Major Updates in SLURM Version 2.5

SLURM Version 2.5 is scheduled for release in November 2012. Major enhancements planned include:

- Recording power usage information for each job.
- Job specification of desired CPU frequency, which will effect it's power usage and possibly its execution cost.
- Integration with FlexLM license management.
- Integration with IBM's Parallel Environment including POE (Parallel Operating Environment) and NRT (Network Resource Table) API.
- Highly optimized thoughput for serial jobs in a new "select/serial" plugin.

## Major Updates in SLURM Version 2.6 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:

- Faster and more powerful job step management support (e.g. step dependencies).
- Improved user support for fault-tolerance (e.g. "hot spare" resources).
- 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.

## Security Patches

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) information is available at
http://cve.mitre.org/.

- CVE-2009-0128
  There is a potential security vulnerability in SLURM where a user could build an invalid job credential in order to execute a job (under his correct UID and GID) on resources not allocated to that user. This vulnerability exists only when the crypto/openssl plugin is used and was fixed in SLURM version 1.3.0.
- CVE-2009-2084
  SLURM failed to properly set supplementary groups before invoking (1) sbcast from the slurmd daemon or (2) strigger from the slurmctld daemon, which might allow local SLURM users to modify files and gain privileges. This was fixed in SLURM version 1.3.14.
- CVE-2010-3308
  There is a potential security vulnerability where if the init.d scripts are executed by user root or SlurmUser to initiate the SLURM daemons and the LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not set and the operating system interprets a blank entry in the path as "." (current working directory) and that directory contains a trojan library, then that library will be used by the SLURM daemon with unpredictable results. This was fixed in SLURM version 2.1.14.

Last modified 17 May 2012