Trivia

The Name Of The Most Popular Supercomputer Job Scheduler In The World Is A Nod To?

Star Trek                                                         Futurama

Quantum Leap                                               The Simpsons

Answer: Futurama

Slurm Workload Manager, originally called Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM), is a free open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels. The manager is specifically designed to handle workloads on supercomputers and computing clusters by allocating resources, providing a framework to “start, execute, and monitor” tasks, and managing incoming pending jobs.

It’s a highly effective workload manager with excellent resource optimization and, with that in mind, it’s no surprise that it manages the workload on around 60 percent of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world, including power house platforms like Piz Daint, IBM Sequoia, Stampede, and Tianhe-2 (one of the fastest supercomputers in the world).

The workload manager is also, in addition to being the world’s most popular supercomputer job scheduler, named in a direct nod to the Futurama universe. In Futurama, Slurm is a very popular and highly addictive soda in a blue and green can with pink text, not entirely unlike Earth’s Mountain Dew and Surge sodas. It’s not much of a coincidence that a reference to Futurama(beloved by many a geek) based on a high-caffeine sodas (also beloved by many a geek) made it into a collaborate supercomputer project (programmed by over 100 geeks around the world).