Slinky: Slurm in Kubernetes, Performant AI and HPC Workload Management in Kubernetes - Tim Wickberg
Tim Wickberg
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · Session
In this KubeCon EU talk, Tim Wickberg, CTO of SKTMD, introduced **Slinky**, an ambitious open-source project designed to bridge the long-standing gap between traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments managed by **SLURM** and the modern cloud-native ecosystem orchestrated by Kubernetes. The presentation highlighted the divergent philosophies and capabilities of these two powerful systems, particularly in their approach to resource management and workload scheduling for demanding AI/ML and scientific simulations.
AI review
This talk introduces Slinky, an open-source project from the original SLURM developers, SKTMD, designed to integrate SLURM's HPC-grade workload management with Kubernetes. It offers a dual approach: a Slurm Operator for deploying and managing SLURM clusters within Kubernetes, and a more innovative Slurm Bridge that acts as a Kubernetes scheduling plugin, allowing SLURM to directly schedule multi-node Kubernetes workloads. The project addresses a significant operational challenge in converging AI/ML training and inference, demonstrating solid technical depth and a clear path towards unified…