Volcano

KAI Scheduler is a scheduler from NVIDIA for Kubernetes-based AI workloads. It brings gang scheduling, which schedules a workload's required tasks together, and topology awareness to the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It manages containerized applications across multiple hosts, providing mechanisms for deploying, maintaining, scaling, and scheduling workloads. Applications can be configured with YAML and deployed across hybrid-cloud environments; the platform is also used for production operations involving storage, databases, networking, and security hardening.

Crusoe Cloud is Crusoe's cloud infrastructure platform for AI workloads, providing compute, storage, networking, GPU node pools, and a console for managing and observing GPU infrastructure. Crusoe describes its offering as AI infrastructure and cloud compute with an energy-first approach. Its Managed Slurm runs on Kubernetes: Slurm provides gang scheduling, topology awareness, and familiar sbatch workflows, while Kubernetes supplies dynamic resource management, node health handling, and observability. The platform's AutoClusters can notify operators, drain and replace a failed GPU node, requeue the workload, and resume training from a checkpoint without manual intervention; the demonstrations also cover sharing GPUs between training and inference as demand changes.

HashiCorp Nomad is a workload scheduler and orchestrator for deploying and managing containerized and non-containerized applications across on-premises environments and cloud infrastructure. It expresses workloads as jobs, schedules them onto clusters, and uses task drivers to execute different types of tasks; job specifications can include parameterized behavior, placement affinities, preemption, retries, and node rescheduling. Nomad supports integrations such as Consul for service discovery, health checking, and service mesh capabilities, and Vault for secrets. It is a competitor in the container-orchestration ecosystem, where Kubernetes ultimately prevailed. HashiCorp provides a CLI, tutorials, a sandbox, production guidance, and an Enterprise edition with features including access control, resource quotas, Sentinel integration, and encrypted cluster traffic.

Slinky is an open-source Kubernetes operator for running Slurm on Kubernetes. The project provides the foundation for Crusoe's managed Slurm service, combining Slurm-based scheduling with Kubernetes infrastructure for GPU-oriented workloads.