[Bioclusters] GridEngine on MacOSX (was: Apple/Genentech BLAST)

[Ron Chen]

> I'd appreciate any other suggestions on free cycle
> stealing queuing environments.
>
> I plan to migrate jobs between the group/flocks
> using Globus.

I am not sure if you've heard of GridEngine (SGE) or
not,it is a free, opensource batch system developed
by Sun (actually, it was bought by Sun and opensoured,
like StarOffice).

IMHO, it is more stable than PBS (I only used OpenPBS
before, but people told me that it is better than
PBSPro), its fault tolerance is better (1 or more
stand-by masters can be setup to take over the
running master host in case of host failure), and it
has more scheduling algorithms too (like sharetree,
functional, deadline, and override), which may be
useful in your environment as you may want to share
the cluster with different groups, or different
projects.

There actually are more features, but they are
available also in PBSPro, like killing the running
jobs when the workstation need to be returned to the
user; configuration of "load sensors" to monitor the
status of resources other than those built-in the
batch system.

It is available on MacOSX, totally free of charge to
any users, and there is Globus support too.

You can learn more about SGE or download the source --
http://gridengine.sunsource.net

Lastly, Sun does not keep special patches for SGE, the
source available from the project site is the one
they use to build the commerical version. On the other
hand, Veridian puts more enchancements in PBSPro and
OpenPBS is more and more broken...

And if you need 24x7 support on platforms other than
Solaris and Linux, you can contact one of the 17 Sun
partners providing support --
http://wwws.sun.com/software/gridware/partners/index.html

Hope you find the info useful,
-Ron

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