Cluster Resources Inc., announced that TORQUE Resource Manager passed a new milestone in its continued success, reaching 50,000 downloads since August 2005.

Terascale Open-Source Resource and QUEue Manager, more commonly known as TORQUE, is a resource manager derived from the original Open PBS project that provides control over batch jobs and distributed compute nodes. With more than 2,500 patches and enhancements since its release in 2004, TORQUE has incorporated significant advances in the areas of scalability, flexibility and feature extensions.

“We are pleased to be part of the TORQUE community project that continues to provide a leading resource management solution for Top 500 systems and thousands of other clusters worldwide,” said David Jackson, CTO of Cluster Resources. “Combining professional development, testing, support and documentation with the extensive support and development contributions of the TORQUE community, has proven to be highly successful.”

Over the past six months, TORQUE downloads have grown almost exponentially. Cluster Resources recorded approximately 33,000 total downloads from February through July, nearly double the previous six-month’s total. TORQUE is also included for download in most of the major cluster building kits, including ROCKS, OSCAR, xCAT and others. When including these kits, downloads over the past year are estimated at more than 100,000.

Cluster Resources -- providers of the Moab family of workload management products -- professionally maintains and develops TORQUE, incorporating hundreds of feature extension patches from NCSA, OSC, USC, U.S. Department of Energy, Sandia, PNNL, U of Buffalo, Teragrid and many other leading HPC institutions and individuals in the user community. Cluster Resources also supports and maintains the TORQUE documentation and user lists, and provides current versions and patches at www.clusterresources.com/torque.

Through TORQUE’s user lists and documentation Wiki, community members are able to submit or view patches, suggestions or questions in the archive, and contribute new information to the user manual, providing an active forum for the development of new ideas.

Garrick Staples, a lead developer of TORQUE, attributes the continued development of TORQUE to the collaborative efforts of the user community and Cluster Resources.

“Since many TORQUE users are the administrators of their own clusters, their needs often drive the competitive edge of our development focus,” Staples said. “TORQUE also has the strong backing of Cluster Resources, through whose leadership, the collective wisdom and requirements of thousands of sites worldwide are being plugged directly into TORQUE.”

To facilitate community involvement in TORQUE development, Cluster Resources recently began the use of Subversion -- an open-source version control system dedicated to source configuration management. By integrating anonymous checkout through Subversion, users can more easily access the TORQUE source code to test and implement their own improvements.

“We take suggestions for improvements seriously,” said Josh Butikofer, a product manager for Cluster Resources. “Whenever users make suggestions and improvements, or request that TORQUE be able to perform an additional task, the community works together to try and find a way to make it happen.”

Before making any changes to the original source code, Cluster Resources tests the relevant submission enhancements in order to ensure the continued reliability and functionality of TORQUE.

Cluster Resources focuses on enabling long-term core enhancements to TORQUE in the areas of scalability, security, reliability and usability. In recent versions of TORQUE, Cluster Resources has implemented a number of significant feature enhancements including tight PAM integration, improved SGI CPUSet support, initial job array support, and dynamic resource definitions. The newest version of TORQUE, 2.1.2, offers X11 forwarding and also supports client-commands on Windows using Cygwin.

TORQUE is currently in use at hundreds of leading government, academic, and commercial sites throughout the world and is used on many of the world's largest clusters and grids. TORQUE scales from single SMP machines and clusters to sites with tens of thousands of jobs and nearly 10,000 processors.

“We look forward to continuing the same level of development excellence that has led to TORQUE's success,” Jackson said. “We welcome cluster users everywhere to try out TORQUE, to get involved and to help cultivate the type of ideas that have produced one of the best community resource management solutions in the HPC industry.”