TORQUE
TORQUE, which stands for Terascale Open-source Resource and Queue Manager, sits at the heart of high-performance computing clusters around the world. Its job is simple to describe but hard to execute: watch over batch jobs and the distributed compute nodes that run them. How does a piece of software keep hundreds or thousands of machines organized, fed with work, and running efficiently? That question is what TORQUE was built to answer, and the organizations behind it range from national laboratories to university supercomputing centers.
TORQUE grew out of the Portable Batch System, known as PBS. The original OpenPBS code, specifically version 2.3, became the license under which early TORQUE releases operated. Rather than starting from scratch, the community inherited a proven foundation and set about extending it. Scalability, fault tolerance, and broader functionality were the areas where contributors focused their energy. Each improvement pushed TORQUE further from its PBS origins while keeping the core idea intact: a manager that schedules work across distributed compute resources.
NCSA, OSC, USC, the US Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories, PNNL, UB, and the TeraGrid project all count among the notable contributors to TORQUE. That roster spans academic computing centers, federal energy research, and national security laboratories. Few open-source projects attract participation from such a wide cross-section of high-performance computing institutions. Each contributor brought real operational needs, and those needs shaped the feature set that TORQUE accumulated over time.
TORQUE does not schedule work on its own. It integrates with one of two external schedulers: the Maui Cluster Scheduler, which is non-commercial, or the Moab Workload Manager, which is sold commercially. This pairing gives site administrators a choice. Smaller or budget-constrained operations can connect TORQUE to Maui; those requiring commercial support and advanced optimization can couple it with Moab. Either way, the combination is designed to squeeze better utilization out of the underlying cluster hardware.
By June 2018, TORQUE was no longer classified as open-source software. The change came down to licensing issues. Under scrutiny from the Debian Free Software Guidelines, TORQUE was categorized as non-free, a designation that signals the license does not meet the criteria Debian applies to determine whether software can be freely used, modified, and distributed. The project had operated under the OpenPBS 2.3 license, and that license ultimately fell short of those standards. For the many institutions that had adopted TORQUE under the assumption it was fully open-source, the reclassification raised practical questions about how they would manage their clusters going forward.
Common questions
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.