Maui Cluster Scheduler

What Maui Cluster Scheduler is

Maui Cluster Scheduler is a policy engine for controlling when, where, and how cluster jobs use processors, memory, and disk. Administrators can set job eligibility, priority, and placement, and configure advance reservations, quality-of-service levels, backfill, and allocation management. Maui also helps optimize resource use and monitor system performance.

Maui is a scheduler, not a resource manager. It directs a separate resource manager, which manages job queues and compute nodes. The quick start names OpenPBS, PBSPro, Loadleveler, and SGE as resource managers Maui can query and control. Its fairshare rules use historical resource consumption when determining job feasibility and priority, with utilization targets for users, groups, accounts, classes, and QOS levels.

End-user commands cover cancelling and inspecting jobs, viewing queues and resource availability, checking estimated start times, and reviewing usage statistics. The guide describes three administrator access levels and a shared-secret-key interface security model; it also says fuller encryption and GSI-like security were being enhanced. Installation starts from a source archive and uses configure and make, with an option to install binaries system-wide. The guide gives default structure limits of 4,096 simultaneous jobs, 5,120 compute nodes, and 1,024 nodes allocated to one job.

Who it suits

Maui suits cluster administrators who need to set job policies, priorities, reservations, and fairshare rules while using a separate resource manager for queues and compute nodes. It also provides end-user commands for checking jobs, queues, resource availability, estimated starts, and usage.

Limits

The guide lists default limits of 4,096 simultaneous jobs, 5,120 compute nodes, and 1,024 nodes allocated to one job. Maui also requires an installed and operational resource manager; for clusters up to 10 teraflops, the guide gives requirements of 20–50 MB of RAM and at least 20 MB of disk space.

Getting started

1. Open the Maui documentation website.
2. Obtain and unpack the source archive.
3. Run configure and make as described in the quick start.
4. Optionally install the resulting binaries system-wide.
5. Install and operate a resource manager, such as OpenPBS, PBSPro, Loadleveler, or SGE.
6. Configure Maui to query and control the resource manager.

Verdict

Choose Maui when you need policy-based scheduling for a Linux cluster and already have a supported resource manager to manage queues and compute nodes. Its scheduling controls and fairshare rules are the main reasons to consider it. Look elsewhere if you need Maui itself to manage cluster resources or require fuller encryption and GSI-like security as documented capabilities.