We are pleased to announce the availability of Slurm release candidate 26.11.0rc1. To highlight some new features coming in 26.11: - Add plugin support to the Hierarchical Resources (HRES) subsystem, and the hres/lua plugin script interface. - Add arbitrary key-value metadata (a JSON document) to jobs, nodes, partitions, and reservations. Set it with "scontrol update KV=<json>", "KVPatch=<json>", or "--kv=<json>". Store it in accounting with AccountingStoreFlags=job_kv and resv_kv. - Add the switch/lua plugin to manage interconnects with a Lua script. - Add step dependencies ("srun --step-dependency=") - Add stepmgr support for heterogeneous jobs. Note that slurmctld, slurmd, and srun all need to be upgraded to 26.11 to support this mode of operation. -- Sites are encouraged to enable stepmgr globally through SlurmctldParameters=enable_stepmgr and report any issues before this becomes the default in Slurm 27.05. - Add swait support for waiting on specific steps, as well as a "--follow" option that reports the completion of individual steps while continuing to block until all steps have completed. - Add gpu/amd plugin (AutoDetect=amd) as an alternative to gpu/rsmi for AMD GPUs. This plugin does not require AMD's RSMI library, and will build on all systems. - Add gres/tpu and job_submit/tpu plugins to support Google TPUs. - Add the experimental task/resctrl plugin to confine job steps to resctrl groups (Arm MPAM, Intel RDT, AMD PQoS). Define the groups in resctrl.yaml. - Add support for draining individual GRES on a compute node as a way to mitigate a single failed accelerator card. - Add the dmem cgroup controller to limit shard GRES device memory (ConstrainDeviceMemory=yes). This is the first release candidate of the upcoming 26.11 release series, and represents the end of development for this release, and a finalization of the RPC and state file formats. If any issues are identified with this release candidate, please report them through https://support.schedmd.com against the 26.11.x version and we will address them before the first production 26.11.0 release is made. Please note that the release candidates are not intended for production use. A preview of the updated documentation can be found at https://slurm.schedmd.com/archive/slurm-master/ . Slurm can be downloaded from https://github.com/SchedMD/slurm/releases. The changelog for 26.11 can be found here: https://github.com/SchedMD/slurm/blob/master/CHANGELOG/slurm-26.11.md --  Tim Wickberg twickberg@nvidia.com Director, System Software, Slurm + Slinky, NVIDIA