I really should stay out of this as the last thing I need right now is to be percieved as a Platform LSF flunky but I don't think anyone else is going to respond to this... Just to get my credentials out on the table here -- I've actually been called at home (at night) by a senior Platform Computing person who proceeded to yell at me for comments I made about the LSF product on this forum. Sun can sometimes be equally unhappy with me. Ron- I've been an avid reader of your posts for a long time both on this forum and the sge-users mailing list. For a long time you were one of the few non-Sun people who could coherently talk about what a great product Grid Engine is has become. It was refreshing to see people spreading the gospel out through the beowulf and other lists. Over the last few months though your pro-SGE cheerleading has crossed some sort of threshold for me. Rather than positively promoting what is a very, very good product (SGE) your posts now remind me of some of those idiot slashdot posters & trolls who spew factless FUD-inspired invective and insults against "the enemy". Trust me -- this is not making anyone think more positively about choosing Grid Engine. Now I read your posts and try to figure out just what exactly is the personal axe you are trying to grind. Your advocacy efforts have the potential to do the same harm to Grid Engine as the rabid "if it's not GNU/Linux it's shit!" crowd. You obviously know what you are talking about and your effort is really important but in recent times some sort of other personal agenda or vendetta has been creeping into your posts and tainting your message. Platform Computing is not "the enemy". Commercial software is not "the enemy". Choosing a DRM layer is one of the single most important decisions made for any given clustering project. The decision should be made after carefully evaluating the options and choosing the one that works best for the project, budget, use cases and situation. As I said in a previous post I use both SGE and LSF in my daily work. More comments below... Ron Chen wrote: > IMO, Platform is not that friendly. They like to > spread FUD about other products, e.g. They said that > PBS can't handle over 5000 jobs, and someone told me > that they said similar things about SGE. > Platform techies, engineers, developers and support staff have always been friendly and professional. I've had developers in Beijing and Toronto go _way_ out of their way to help me out whenever I've needed a hand. Same with the SGE developers and people on the sge mailing lists. Techies in general are Good People. Platform salespeople on the other hand have sometimes been arrogant and complacent. For a long time they had a lock on what was unquestionably the best product in the space and they charged and acted accordingly. This has changed now that there is way more competition especially in the Linux clustering space. The salespeople are hungry and responsive now. Trust me :) Platform sales people have never been as aggressive or as creepy as EMC salespeople though. Wow those dudes were like a cult. Regarding FUD Much of the FUD comes from salespeople who have been given competitive briefing information on other products that is usually not up-to-date. OpenPBS _did_ have problems handling more than 5,000 jobs at a time OpenPBS _did_ have documented problems with submitted jobs just *vanishing* from the system -- a critical flaw in my mind. GridEngine did have its growing pains; even in the biocluster space The real problem (I think) was that by the time this news filtered out from the community and into the hands of the Platform salespeople the initial bugs/issues had been fixed. So the problem really with the salespeople is that they know their own product in its current incarnation extremely well but have been briefed on "old" products put out by the competition. This makes them look bad when talking to super-educated customers. The best way to fight FUD is with the truth. If anyone has recent FUD stories to share from a recent Platform sales pitch I'd love to hear about it in this forum. > (In fact, since LSF is not free, they should compare > LSF with PBSPro. And also, I started using SGE from > the very beginning, and I know that even early > versions of SGE can handle many more jobs than that!) The reason everyone has to compare/contrast against OpenPBS is that every single lame-ass wannabe cluster vendor seems to have just lazily stuck a OpenPBS RPM into their cluster image and started calling it a "turnkey solution". SGE has also had its growing pains and bad deployment stories which is where I'm sure some of the SGE FUD is coming from. I do think however that SGE is improving and adding new functionality at a totally amazing rate. > > http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-October/001486.html > http://bioinformatics.org/pipermail/bioclusters/2001-October/000035.html > > Also, both PBS and SGE follow DRMAA, but Platform > pushes NPI -- the LSF API as the "standard". > Both DRMAA and NPI seem to be coming from the Global Grid Forum (GGF) these days. I know Platform is involved at some level with GGF. Anyone from Platform or GGF who can chime in on what the current situation is? What's up with NPI vs DRMAA? > Do you think we should support these kind of > companies? > > -Ron Platform is not evil. Selling & supporting good software is not wrong. You complain about FUD and bad practices but I can't help getting the sense that your primary reason for not liking LSF is that they did not give it to you for free. Just my $.02 -- Chris Dagdigian, <dag@sonsorol.org> BioTeam Inc. - Independent Bio-IT & Informatics consulting Office: 617-666-6454, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193 PGP KeyID: 83D4310E Yahoo IM: craffi Web: http://bioteam.net