# What is a Scheduler?

Most existing High-performance Compute Research Environments are managed by a job scheduler; also known as the batch scheduler, workload manager, queuing system, or load-balancer. The scheduler allows multiple users to fairly share compute nodes, allowing system administrators to control how resources are made available to different groups of users. All schedulers are designed to perform the following functions:

• Allow users to submit new jobs to the research environment
• Allow users to monitor the state of their queued and running jobs
• Allow users and system administrators to control running jobs
• Monitor the status of managed resources including system load, memory available, etc.

When a new job is submitted by a user, the research environment scheduler software assigns compute cores and memory to satisfy the job requirements. If suitable resources are not available to run the job, the scheduler adds the job to a queue until enough resources are available for the job to run. You can configure the scheduler to control how jobs are selected from the queue and executed on research environment nodes, including automatically preparing nodes to run parallel MPI jobs. Once a job has finished running, the scheduler returns the resources used by the job to the pool of free resources, ready to run another user job.