[slurm-announce] Slurm release candidate version 23.11rc1 available for testing

[Tim Wickberg]

We are pleased to announce the availability of Slurm release candidate 
version 23.11.0rc1.

To highlight some new features coming in 23.11:

- Substantially overhauled the SlurmDBD association management code. For 
clusters updated to 23.11, account and user additions or removals are 
significantly faster than in prior releases.

- Overhauled 'scontrol reconfigure' to prevent configuration mistakes 
from disabling slurmctld / slurmd. Instead, an error will be returned, 
and the running configuration will persist. This does require updates to 
the systemd service files to use the --systemd option to slurmctld / slurmd.

- Added a new internal auth/cred plugin - "auth/slurm". This builds off 
the prior auth/jwt model, and permits operation of the slurmdbd and 
slurmctld without access to full directory information with a suitable 
configuration.

- Added a new --external-launcher option to srun, which is automatically 
set by common MPI launcher implementations and ensures processes using 
those non-srun launchers have full access to all resources allocated on 
each node.

- Reworked the dynamic/cloud modes of operation to allow for "fanout" - 
where Slurm communication can be automatically offloaded to compute 
nodes for increased cluster scalability.

- Added initial official Debian packaging support.

- Overhauled and extended the Reservation subsystem to allow for most of 
the same resource requirements as are placed on the job. Notably, this 
permits reservations to now reserve GRES directly.

This is the first release candidate of the upcoming 23.11 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://bugs.schedmd.com against the 23.11.x version and we
will address them before the first production 23.11.0 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://www.schedmd.com/downloads.php .

- Tim

-- 
Tim Wickberg
Chief Technology Officer, SchedMD LLC
Commercial Slurm Development and Support