[slurm-users] Slurm version 21.08 is now available

[Tim Wickberg]

After 9 months of development and testing we are pleased to announce the 
availability of Slurm version 21.08!

Slurm 21.08 includes a number of new features including:

- A new "AccountingStoreFlags=job_script" option to store the job 
scripts directly in SlurmDBD.

- Added "sacct -o SubmitLine" format option to get the submit line of a 
job/step.

- Changes to the node state management so that nodes are marked as 
PLANNED instead of IDLE if the scheduler is still accumulating resources 
while waiting to launch a job on them.

- RS256 token support in auth/jwt.

- Overhaul of the cgroup subsystems to simplify operation, mitigate a 
number of inherent race conditions, and prepare for future cgroup v2 
support.

- Further improvements to cloud node power state management.

- A new child process of the Slurm controller called 'slurmscriptd' 
responsible for executing PrologSlurmctld and EpilogSlurmctld scripts, 
which significantly reduces performance issues associated with enabling 
those options.

- A new burst_buffer/lua plugin allowing for site-specific asynchronous 
job data management.

- Fixes to the job_container/tmpfs plugin to allow the slurmd process to 
be restarted while the job is running without issue.

- Added json/yaml output to sacct, squeue, and sinfo commands.

- Added a new node_features/helpers plugin to provide a generic way to 
change settings on a compute node across a reboot.

- Added support for automatically detecting and broadcasting shared 
libraries for an executable launched with 'srun --bcast'.

- Added initial OCI container execution support with a new --container 
option to sbatch and srun.

- Improved job step launch throughput.

- Improved "configless" support by allowing multiple control servers to 
be specified through the slurmd --conf-server option, and send 
additional configuration files at startup including cli_filter.lua.

Please see the RELEASE_NOTES distributed alongside the source for 
further details.

Thank you to all customers, partners, and community members who 
contributed to this release.

As with past releases, the documentation available at 
https://slurm.schedmd.com has been updated to the 21.08 release. Past 
versions are available in the archive. This release also marks the end 
of support for the 20.02 release. The 20.11 release will remain 
supported up until the 22.05 release next May, but will not see as 
frequent updates, and bug-fixes will be targeted for the 21.08 
maintenance releases going forward.

Slurm can be downloaded from https://www.schedmd.com/downloads.php .

- Tim

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