In addition to using a manual command and host files to create and start jobs on specific nodes, there are also cluster scheduler applications. These generally involve the running of a daemon process on each node as well as the master node. Using the provided tools, one can then manage resources and jobs, scheduling allocation and keeping track of job status.

One of the most popular cluster management scheduler's is SLURM, which short for Simple Linux Utility for Resource management (though now renamed to Slurm Workload Manager with the website at https://slurm.schedmd.com/). It is commonly used by supercomputers as well as many computer clusters. Its primary functions consist out of:

• Allocating exclusive or non-exclusive access to resources (nodes) to specific users using time slots
• The starting and monitoring of jobs such as MPI-based applications on a set of nodes
• Managing a queue of pending jobs to arbitrate contention for shared resources

The setting up of a cluster scheduler is not required for a basic cluster operation, but can be very useful for larger clusters, when running multiple jobs simultaneously, or when having multiple users of the cluster wishing to run their own job.