We are pleased to announce the availability of Slurm release candidate 26.05.0rc1. To highlight some new features coming in 26.05: - New "srun --async" step mode that submits step processes to stepmgr to queue and eventually launch. This avoids issues with keeping a large number of srun processes backgrounded to queue up future step-based workflows. (This was previously described as "mini-batch" in the Slurm roadmap presentations.) - New topology/ring and topology/torus3d topology plugins. These implement a single-dimensional and three-dimensional topology respectively. - Slurm REST API - Add support for creating/updating/removing partitions, and for viewing the active slurmctld and slurmdbd configurations. - Dynamic Memory Resizing. A job can now release memory (and have the cgroup limits updated) using 'scontrol update' while running. A new "sbatch --mem-update=<margin>@<delay>" option can also automatically reduce the memory limit to the current usage plus a given margin percentage after a specified time. - Add topology-based sorting for node ranks when using dynamic nodes with the topology plugins. This is also available generically for topology/flat (no topology) with a new alpha_step_rank option. - Add an optimized single-node path through the scheduling logic for increased performance. - Expanded the openmetrics (Prometheus) nodes, partitions, and jobs endpoints with gpu allocation statistics. This is the first release candidate of the upcoming 26.05 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 26.05.x version and we will address them before the first production 26.05.0 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 26.05 can be found here: https://github.com/SchedMD/slurm/blob/master/CHANGELOG/slurm-26.05.md -- Tim Wickberg Director, System Software, Slurm + Slinky, NVIDIA