Slurm Workload Manager vs TORQUE Resource Manager

Slurm Workload Manager is free, open-source software for allocating compute resources and scheduling work across Linux clusters. It starts and monitors jobs on allocated nodes and manages queues of pending work. Optional plugins add accounting, advanced reservations, gang and backfill scheduling, topology-aware resource selection, resource limits, and multifactor job prioritization. The system uses a central slurmctld manager and slurmd daemons on compute nodes; accounting and REST components are optional. GPU plugins support NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia accelerators, along with NVIDIA MPS and GPU sharing. Accounting can use MySQL or MariaDB and can record data in a text file, directly in a database, or through slurmdbd for multiple clusters. Slurmrestd provides REST access, but the API is not designed for direct internet exposure and supports only unencrypted HTTP. Linux is thoroughly tested on arm64, ppc64, and x86_64; FreeBSD and NetBSD support is limited, and macOS is unsupported. Deployment is self-hosted.

TORQUE Resource Manager is an open-source resource and queue manager for compute clusters, based on the original PBS resource manager. The project is free, with Linux, macOS, API and self-hosted options. TORQUE 4.0 release notes state that it can support clusters with more than 15,000 compute nodes; that release also introduced a multithreaded pbs_server intended to improve command response and job throughput. An optional MOM hierarchy can reduce update traffic from compute nodes to pbs_server and lets administrators manage network communication. In version 4.0, component communication moved to TCP/IP, removing UDP and RPP. The trqauthd daemon authorizes client connections to pbs_server and must run as root on client hosts. Linux builds can optionally use control groups and cpusets, and documentation describes integration with Moab Workload Manager. The project is built from source using configure and make; installation instructions also cover RPM and self-extracting package creation. Its license terms are in the repository's PBS_License.txt. A compatibility caveat for version 4.0 is that its components cannot communicate with earlier TORQUE versions, so rolling upgrades will not work.