To munge or not to munge (2025-11-6)

Gridware Cluster Scheduler supports munge authentication in daily builds since a while, bringing enhanced security to containerized workloads. This widely-adopted service runs as a separate daemon, verifying real UID/GID for cluster tools like qsub and qrsh across multi-node environments.

The security benefits are particularly valuable when allowing user namespaces for containers, ensuring safe operation without authentication compromises. Best of all, installation couldn't be simpler—just add the -munge flag to your installer command:

./inst_sge -munge -m ...

For anyone running containerized HPC workloads, munge support is highly recommended and easy enough that the answer to "to munge or not to munge" is clearly: munge.