TESTING

Slurm continues to be the most popular job queuing, resource manager, or scheduling software at HPC sites around the world. In a recent study, Slurm maintained its lead with half of all respondents (50.0%) reporting they use Slurm at least some of the time. After Slurm, the most popular resource managers and schedulers were OpenPBS (18.9%), PBS Pro (13.9%), Torque (13.3%), NQS (12.2%), and LSF (10.6%). This data is from an annual study that is part of the eighth edition of Hyperion Research's HPC end-user-based tracking of the HPC marketplace. It included 181 HPC end-user sites with 3,830 HPC systems.

Two weeks ago, the US Department of Defense officially canceled its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud solicitation and contract, ending a long period of uncertainty and controversy. Originally, the contract, which designated $10 billion to support cloud computing capabilities for a variety of workloads and departments across the DoD, had been awarded to a single vendor, Microsoft Azure, in 2019. However, after appeals from other vendors, the process was reevaluated. Ultimately Microsoft was awarded the contract a second time. After nearly two years into the JEDI solicitation and award process, the DoD stated that their needs had evolved, and the original contract no longer aligned with the requirements of the department. A new solicitation was issued, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, which indicated a plan to use multiple vendors to fulfill the needs of the contract. Currently, the DoD is seeking proposals from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services but will likely evaluate other qualified U.S. based CSPs.