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Grid Engine Implementations

News Grid engine Recommended Links  Installation of Grid Engine Master Host Installation of the Execution Hosts
Sun SGE 6.2u5 Grid Scheduler Son of Grid Engine Oracle Grid Engine UNIVA Grid Engine
Migrating to Son of Grid Engine 8.1.8 Installation of Son of Grid Engine 8.1.8 RPMs for Master Host Installation of the Son of Grid Engine 8.1.8 RPMs for Execution Host SGE 6.2u5 RPMs from EPEL are Junk Using the command line installer
Installation of SCE on a small set of multicore servers Usage of NFS SGE History Humor Etc

Introduction

According to Wikipedia (Oracle Grid Engine)  in 2000, Sun acquired Gridware, Inc. a private software development company with offices in San Jose, Calif., and Regensburg, Germany.  Later that year, Sun offered a free version of Gridware for Solaris and Linux, and renamed the product Sun Grid Engine.

In 2001, Sun made the source code available,  and adopted the open source development model. Ports for Mac OS X and *BSD were contributed by the non-Sun open source developers.

In 2010, after the purchase of Sun by Oracle, the Grid Engine 6.2 update 6 source code was not included with the binaries, and changes were not put back to the project's source repository. In response to this, the Grid Engine community started the Open Grid Scheduler project to continue to develop and maintain a free implementation of Grid Engine.

On January 18, 2011, it was announced that Univa had recruited several principal engineers from the former Sun Grid Engine team. Initially Univa produces both commercial and open source version (so called Core version) but very soon open source version disappeared and only commercial was offered.  This is the only version of SGE which includes  commercial support.  Quality of version is not impressive.

On Oct 22, 2013 Univa has announced that it had acquired the intellectual property and trademarks pertaining to the Grid Engine technology and that Univa will take over support for Oracle Grid Engine customers. Those who have permanent license (the majority of Oracle customers) can use Oracle Grid Engine without support indefinitely. it is actually pretty well debugged although GUI  tool called mon does not work on newer version of RHEL such as 5.x and 6.x.

Right now SGE exists in several versions.

Overview of major versions

The main difference with the versions of SGE floating around is not functionality, which is adequate even in version 6.2u5, but reliability. Lack of manpower hurt attempts to develop viable open source derivatives of version 6.2u5. Son of grid engine (which is the only actively maintained open source project for SGE) is essentially a one man project which is not enough man power for such a complex software. Unfortunately despite the fact that many labs use open source version no strong team of researchers supporting open source version development ever emerged. And even existing efforts splintered the codebase (Open Grid Scheduler vs ‘Son of Grid Engine’)

Conclusions

As of November 2014 Son of Grid Engine is the only "datacenter class" open source implementation that is still under active development.  Dave Love, the maintainer of this version also created and an very useful web (https://arc.liv.ac.uk/trac/SGE) site with "remnants" of mercilessly discarded by Oracle Sun documents, open source software and other materials. It is such a pity that Oracle people proved to be such a clueless vandals.  

Technical difficulties and the lack of funding were not the only problems facing Dave Love. Univa considered him to be a threat  to their revenue stream and tried to suppress Dave Love effort by sending a pretty threatening latter. He withstood this attack.

Note that, contrary to multiple claims, there is no evidence that any Sun (or other) material here is being distributed without an appropriate licence allowing it. See the rebuttal. Reports of licensing bugs are very welcome, of course.

As of version 8.1.8 it  is the most well debugged open source distribution. It is also very attractive for those who what have experience with building software. Installation is pretty raw, but I tried to compensate for that creating several pages which together document installtion provess of RHEL 6.5 or 6.6 pretty well:

With the current size of codebase he is engaged in a very difficult, exhausting battle.  We all need to support his efforts. Son of Grid engine is essentially a one man project which is not enough man power for such a complex software. Unfortunately despite the fact that many labs use open source version no strong team of researchers supporting open source version development ever emerged. And even existing efforts splintered the codebase (see the story of Open Grid Scheduler vs ‘Son of Grid Engine’).

In any case we can state that lack of manpower and lack of  support revenue from the open source version of SGE hurts attempts to develop viable derivatives of classic version 6.2u5 and Dave Love was and still is the only guy who successfully swims against the stream.

Like any software development, the development of Grid engine is essentially a battle of ideas. And this is one of those cases when open source software managed to withstand and survive attempts of commercial developers to monopolize the field for themselves. 

We own much gratitude to the Sun brass which opened the codebase and release pretty advanced version (version 6.2u5) as an open source. It looks like if opened source version released is sufficiently advanced and has certain (critical) number of customers it has better chances to survive. But which project survives and which dies dependents of particular circumstances.  

We also owve  much gratitude to Dave Love who managed to launch and sustain his open source project -- Son of Grid engine, which now is of version 8.1.8.  I wonder if Debian maintainers can  serve as a quality assurance team for this product. This would be a valuable change.

See SGE implementations for more details about SGE development and the issues of selection of the right version of SGE. There is an active SGE users list at gridengine.org site.

Among similar open source products the most prominent are Maui Scheduler and OpenPBS (commercial version is called PBS Pro).

 

See history for more information. There is an active SGE users list at gridengine.org site.



Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotesSomerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose BierceBernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


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Last modified: March, 12, 2019