[wickberg]

Cluster authentication actually remains the sore point for all interactions - for most systems the least-common denominator remains whether one can SSH into a login node. At which point the main job commands - sbatch/squeue - are pretty stable.

There have been some attempts to standardize basic job management APIs in the past - DRMAA being one noteworthy example. Although DRMAA v2 was only ever implemented by Grid Engine, and is effectively an lightly-abstracted version of their internal APIs, that has never really seen first-class adoption by Slurm/PBS/LSF.

For Slurm, the REST API is meant to be the way forward. It punts the authentication problem to, potentially, anything the admins may care to wire up through an Apache / NGINX proxy. And the basic job submission and status APIs have stablizied to the point that a client application should be able to consume nearly any version going forward.