gridengine.info

Congratulations to the SGE development, release and testing teams who have announced today that Grid Engine 6.2u5 is officially out! This is a "new features" release as well which is always excellent.

As usual, read the full announcement text here:
http://gridengine.sunsource.net/news/SGE62u5-announce.html

For me, the highlight new features are going to be the array job throttling tools (previously available in undocumented form) and slotwise preemption. I suspect others are really going to like the new ability to do topology aware job placement via the new job2core features.

And continuing in a trend of putting some value-adding features only in the commercial version of SGE available directly from Sun, there are some features that won't be built into the freely available courtesy binaries:

• Enhancements to the sgeInspect GUI including more graphical wizards for PE and cloud adapter configuration
• Formal support for Amazon EC2 cloud instances via a cloud adaptor that integrates with Sun's SDM service domain management stack
• Native support for Hadoop/SGE integration (!!)

Most compelling of the "commercial only" features for me is probably the seamless Hadoop integration -- I need to take a long look at seeing how that functions and performs. The sgeInspect tool is fantastic in action but not something I'd truly consider essential to have. Same goes for the SDM/Cloud/EC2 stuff -- it's nice to see it happening but I have yet to get my own head around how I'd deploy it in a production setting.

Sun has done the right thing and left the special features in the public codebase. There is nothing stopping determined people from building their own versions but I'd argue if you are at the point where you are building these options from source and using them in a production setting your use of SGE is probably important enough to merit a support contract or some other formal arrangement with Sun.

My coworkers and I do build some of these for our own use and we have made an intentional decision not to share the methods online - it's important that Sun make money on this product, especially with the Oracle merger hanging overhead.