Slurm Workload Manager
Hacker ApprovedRanked 3 of 3 job schedulers by recommenders
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.
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.
15 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 5
- approval share
- 67%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Battle-tested in HPC production
“Slurm has been battle-tested for 20+ years in production HPC.”
Comment from 24 Apr 2026 on Hacker News “SLURM is old but still huge in the HPC space for a reason!”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “30 Years of HPC: many hardware advances, little adoption of new languages” Predictable, efficient job running
“the system is highly predictable, slowly changing, and I can get my work done”
Comment from 11 Feb 2026 in “Migrating from Slurm to Kubernetes” “It does that well and runs jobs efficiently.”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “30 Years of HPC: many hardware advances, little adoption of new languages” Easy cluster and GPU management
“finally made both usage and management of a cluster of nodes really easy and fun”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “Don't rent the cloud, own instead” “gpus on slurm/pbs could not be simpler”
Comment from 4 Mar 2026 in “Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Painful and hard to use
“tend to be extremely painful to use (hello slurm!)”
Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?” “SLURM absolutely sucks for that.”
Comment from 25 Nov 2025 in “Show HN: Virtual SLURM HPC cluster in a Docker Compose”
Other job schedulers people recommend
The two most recommended other job schedulers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| systemd timers | 40 | 16 | 71% | 7 | — | Approved |
| cron | 36 | 23 | 61% | 9 | 32 yrs10 owners | — |
| Slurm Workload ManagerThis page | 10 | 5 | 67% | 6 | — | Approved |
What people said
All 16 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“tend to be extremely painful to use (hello slurm!)”
“Slurm has been battle-tested for 20+ years in production HPC.”
“It does that well and runs jobs efficiently.”
“SLURM is old but still huge in the HPC space for a reason!”
“They seldom if at all do the right thing when it comes to logging or general integration with the environment they run in.”
“gpus on slurm/pbs could not be simpler”
“the system is highly predictable, slowly changing, and I can get my work done”
“finally made both usage and management of a cluster of nodes really easy and fun”
“SLURM can easily cluster the separate computers as worker nodes”
“started having problems once we tried to multi cloud”
“SLURM/PBS, when properly configured, can ensure that local clusters do not spill over and not use resources that are not supposed to be used.”
“its API:s are awfully inconsistent and there's a lot of code churn between versions”
“these systems are quite overkill when all you have is a single node shared by a few users”
“SLURM absolutely sucks for that.”
“Slurm is the modern alternative. We are using SGE too and slurm feels like the future.”
“I wish there was a sane modern alternative to SLURM.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.