OpenPBS vs Xi-Batch

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.

Xi-Batch is a self-hosted scheduler for sequencing and controlling batch work across servers, positioned as an alternative to cron. Scheduling variables coordinate serial or parallel job chains across hosts. Calendar rules account for month ends, weekends, holidays and daylight saving time, while file monitoring can trigger jobs when files are created, deleted or amended. Administrators assign load values and queue ceilings to limit which job combinations start. Interfaces include command-line, full-screen character, Motif, GTK3 and a programmer API. Jobs can use shell scripts and processors such as Perl and SQL. User definitions and permissions control submission and visibility. Queues recover automatically after restart, and aborted jobs can go to operator action or automatic recovery. Xi-Batch supports Linux and Windows; Windows server support uses optional client modules. It is designed for trusted networks or one host, not untrusted exposure.