On Thu, 02 May 2002 13:56:44 -0400 "Sylvain Foisy" <foisys@mac.com> wrote: > THE BATCH SYSTEM > > We had a look around and decided to go with an open-source system, > primary because of cost consideration but also for philosophical > reasons. After looking hard, I found the following solutions: > > The Condor project > Parasol > OSCAR > Sun GridEngine I have not used Condor, but keep in mind the limitations listed at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/manual/v6.3/1_4Current_Limitations.html OSCAR is not a load balancing system, but it does include OpenPBS. > After reading the docs for each, we have pretty much decided either for > OSCAR or SGE. What should be our criterions for finalizing our choice? > Any inputs from people with experience with both systems would be > appreciated. They are both fairly easy to set up in a basic configuration, and both take a bit more time to customize for things like consumable resources and parallel environments (e.g. mpi and pvm). I like Grid Engine better so far because I was able to set up parallel execution environments more quickly and with tighter integration. Note that when I tried it with OpenPBS a couple of years ago on Linux Alpha I was brand new to clusters. One thing you might take into account is that the Grid Engine has the same code as the commercial version sold and supported by Sun. I believe PBSpro eventually folds improvements into OpenPBS, so that might not be seen as that great of a benefit. The University of Alberta has a web interface to PBS (haven't used it). http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~pinchak/PBSWeb/intro.html I think Sun is making a web portal for for Grid Engine, but I couldn't find it on their site. One other thing. The open source community around OpenPBS is older and probably quite a bit bigger than SGE's. The volume of mail on their support lists reflects this. I have gotten excellent help quickly on both mailing lists. Andrew Shewmaker