# Slurm Workload Manager

10 Hacker News commenters recommended Slurm Workload Manager and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for running and scheduling jobs efficiently on HPC clusters, with a long production record. Critics say its APIs change often between versions.

## Why people recommend it

- Battle-tested in HPC production (2 comments): "Slurm has been battle-tested for 20+ years in production HPC." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884905)) "SLURM is old but still huge in the HPC space for a reason!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806707))
- Predictable, efficient job running (2 comments): "the system is highly predictable, slowly changing, and I can get my work done" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46979771)) "It does that well and runs jobs efficiently." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47807597))
- Easy cluster and GPU management (2 comments): "finally made both usage and management of a cluster of nodes really easy and fun" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902234)) "gpus on slurm/pbs could not be simpler" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242514))

## What people warn about

- Painful and hard to use (2 comments): "tend to be extremely painful to use (hello slurm!)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49751590)) "SLURM absolutely sucks for that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46050190))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [systemd timers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/systemd-timers.md): 40 recommend
- [cron](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cron.md): 36 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Slurm Workload Manager", https://hackerapproved.com/p/slurm/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).