gridengine.info

Important Note: Sun has changed the license terms for this release. The full release from Sun.com can only be used for 90 days for free. The courtesy binaries are still free for all to use but the distribution will not include the Amazon EC2 cloud adaptor or the excellent "sgeinspect" tool. Source code for both of these components is available under the SISSL license so theoretically community members can build versions for themselves.

The full release announcement is here:
http://gridengine.sunsource.net/news/SGE62u3-announce.html

For me, the most important new features are the SGEInspect tool (screenshots of which you can view online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisdag/sets/72157617805352910/ and the exclusive host scheduling feature which now removes the need for PE-based 'hacks' to achieve the same goal.

The license change is interesting, I need to see how hard it is to build sgeinspect from source code, it really is a powerful new tool. It's a shame that this won't be part of the free distribution but then again I want Sun to make product and support revenue off of SGE so I can see the point.

Wow, some great new features added to this beta, see below for the full details or just read the full announcement. The beta will last through 5/20/2009 so get your feedback in quickly. The team is planning for an official production release in June 2009.

Sun Grid Engine Inspect
SGE Inspect, a new Monitoring and Configuration Console, allows to monitor Sun Grid Engine clusters and to monitor and configure the Service Domain Manager (SDM).

Service Domain Manager (SDM) - Cloud Adapter and Initial Power Saving Support
The new SDM service adapter interface adds support to manage external virtual resources. The implementation provides an interface to manage Amazon's EC2 AMIs. Those AMIs could include SGE execution hosts which can be added to a local Sun Grid Engine cluster.

The enhanced spare pool implementation can be configured to power cycle machines when being added or removed from the spare pool.

"Exclusive Job" Scheduling Enhancement
Jobs and all parallel tasks of a job can request exclusive scheduling on a host. Jobs requiring resources only available for one job per host or jobs having access patterns to hardware resources like CPUs or memory, which make it useful to run only one job per machine can request non shared access.

Complete Microsoft Windows Vista Support for GUI Jobs
A native Windows job can now open a GUI on a Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 desktop (SGE 6.2u2 added support for those Windows operating systems)