Moab HPC Suite vs OpenPBS

Moab HPC Suite is self-hosted software for scheduling workloads and managing resources across high-performance computing infrastructure. It runs on Linux and exposes an API. Scheduling algorithms place jobs and assign resources to improve cluster utilization and reduce waiting. Automatic workload balancing and priority management direct capacity toward critical jobs. Administrators can define scheduling, allocation, and user-access policies, including quota controls. The suite provides cluster-performance and resource-use reporting, GPU utilization metrics, and management of multiple HPC clusters through one interface with unified monitoring and control. Its high-availability architecture includes failover capabilities for continuous operation of critical workloads. Enterprise Edition components include Moab Workload Manager, Moab Web Services, Moab Accounting Manager, and TORQUE Resource Manager. Moab Web Services provides REST access to jobs, nodes, virtual machines, and reservations. Documentation lists TORQUE 5.0.1 and SLURM support, manual and RPM installation, and guides for Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu-based systems. Pricing is available on request.

OpenPBS schedules jobs and manages workloads in high-performance computing environments, including clusters, clouds, and supercomputers. Its policy-driven scheduling balances job turnaround time and system utilization while selecting job placements. The system is designed for millions of cores and has been tested beyond 50,000 nodes. A plugin framework provides administration visibility and supports customized extensions. Health checks monitor faults and can mitigate them automatically; the fail-over architecture is designed to avoid a single point of failure and keep jobs running through failures. OpenPBS is self-hosted and free under the AGPL 3.0 open-source license, while PBS Pro is also dual licensed commercially. Public-sector organizations such as academic and research facilities generally choose the open-source license. Community help comes through a volunteer forum, without a guarantee of answers or bug fixes. OpenPBS is integrated into the OpenHPC software stack. The installation guide states that SELinux is not supported, and critical and high security fixes are delivered in the next major release.