# What's New

## Index

- SLURM Version 2.5, November 2012
- SLURM Version 2.6, scheduled for April 2013
- SLURM Version 2.7 and beyond
- Security Patches

## Major Updates in SLURM Version 2.5

SLURM Version 2.5 was release in November 2012. Major enhancements include:

- Support added for Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC) processors.
- User control over CPU frequency of each job step.
- Recording power usage information for each job.
- Advanced reservation of cores rather than whole nodes.
- Integration with IBM's Parallel Environment including POE (Parallel Operating Environment) and NRT (Network Resource Table) API.
- Highly optimized throughput for serial jobs in a new "select/serial" plugin.
- CPU load is information available
- Configurable number of CPUs available to jobs in each SLURM partition, which provides a mechanism to reserve CPUs for use with GPUs.

## Major Updates in SLURM Version 2.6

SLURM Version 2.6 is scheduled for release in April 2013. Major enhancements planned include:

- Support for job arrays, which increases performance and ease of use for sets of similar jobs.
- MapReduce support (launches ~1000x faster, runs ~10x faster).
- Prolog and epilog support for advanced reservations.
- Much faster throughput for job step execution with --exclusive option. The srun process is notified when resources become available rather than periodic polling.
- Support improved for Intel MIC (Many Integrated Core) processor.
- Advanced reservations with hostname and core counts now supports asymmetric reservations (e.g. specific different core count for each node).
- Finer-grained BlueGene resouce management (partitions/queues and advanced reservations containing less than a whole midplane).

## Major Updates in SLURM Version 2.7 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:

- Scheduling optimized for energy efficiency.
- 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.
- Scheduling optimized for energy efficiency.
- Integration with FLEXlm (Flexnet Publisher) license management.

## 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 6 March 2013