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Questions about TORQUE

Short answers, pulled from the story.

What does TORQUE stand for in high-performance computing?

TORQUE stands for Terascale Open-source Resource and Queue Manager. It is a distributed resource manager designed to oversee batch jobs and distributed compute nodes in cluster environments.

What software is TORQUE based on?

TORQUE is based on the Portable Batch System (PBS), specifically building from the OpenPBS version 2.3 codebase. The TORQUE community expanded on this foundation to improve scalability, fault tolerance, and overall functionality.

Which organizations contributed to TORQUE development?

Notable contributors to TORQUE include NCSA, OSC, USC, the US Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories, PNNL, UB, and TeraGrid, alongside other high-performance computing entities.

What schedulers can TORQUE be integrated with?

TORQUE can be integrated with either the Maui Cluster Scheduler, which is non-commercial, or the Moab Workload Manager, which is a commercial product. Both integrations provide enhanced scheduling and optimization for cluster environments.

Is TORQUE still open-source software?

As of June 2018, TORQUE is no longer considered open-source software due to licensing issues. It was previously released under the OpenPBS version 2.3 license but was categorized as non-free software according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

What does TORQUE do in a computing cluster?

TORQUE manages batch jobs and distributed compute nodes, providing control over cluster utilization, job scheduling, and administration tasks. It acts as the resource manager layer, typically paired with a separate scheduler such as Maui or Moab.