Oracle Grid Engine

Oracle Grid Engine

Developer(s)	Oracle Corporation (formerly Sun Microsystems) in association with the community
Stable release	6.2u7 / December 24, 2010; 10 months ago (2010-12-24)[1]
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Grid computing
License	SISSL
Website	oracle.com

Oracle Grid Engine,^[2] previously known as Sun Grid Engine (SGE), previously known as CODINE (COmputing in DIstributed Networked Environments) or GRD (Global Resource Director),^[3] is an open source batch-queuing system, developed and supported by Sun Microsystems. Sun once also sold a commercial product based on SGE, known as N1 Grid Engine (N1GE).

Grid Engine is open source and free to use from the project website under the Sun Industry Standards Source License.^[4] There is a commercial version available from the Oracle site.^[5] It appears that all further versions, starting from 6.2u6, will be commercial (with a 90-day free trial)^[6]

SGE is typically used on a computer farm or high-performance computing (HPC) cluster and is responsible for accepting, scheduling, dispatching, and managing the remote and distributed execution of large numbers of standalone, parallel or interactive user jobs. It also manages and schedules the allocation of distributed resources such as processors, memory, disk space, and software licenses.

SGE is the foundation of the Sun Grid utility computing system, made available over the Internet in the United States in 2006,^[7] later becoming available in many other countries.

Features

A screenshot of the xml-qstat web interface.

Features new in version 6.2

• Advance reservation
• Array job interdependencies
• Rule-based Resource Quota control ^[8]
• Enhanced remote execution (without using external rshd/rlogind/sshd processes)
• Multi-clustering ^[9]
• Daemons managed by the Service Management Facility on Solaris
• Pseudo TTY (pty) support for interactive jobs
• Job Submission Verifier (client-side and server-side job verification)
• GUI Installer and SGE Inspect
• Topology-aware scheduling and thread binding
• Hadoop integration, Amazon EC2 integration for cloud computing

Other features of SGE include:

• Multiple advanced scheduling algorithms allow powerful policy-based resource allocation
• Cluster queues
• Job and scheduler fault tolerance - Grid Engine continues to operate as long as there is one or more hosts available
• Job checkpointing
• Job arrays and job tasks
• DRMAA (Job API)
• Resource reservation
• XML status reporting (qstat and qhost), and the xml-qstat^[10] web interface
• Parallel jobs (MPI, PVM, OpenMP), and scalable parallel job startup with qrsh^[11]
• Usage accounting
• Accounting and Reporting COnsole (ARCO)
• parallel make: distmake, dmake (Sun Studio), and SGE's own qmake
• FLEXlm integration^[12][13] and multi-cluster software license management with LicenseJuggler^[14]

Platforms

SGE runs on multiple platforms, including:

• AIX
• BSD - FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
• HP-UX
• IRIX
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Solaris
• SUPER-UX
• Tru64
• Windows via SFU (Interix) or SUA (Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX) (as execution hosts only)
• Z/OS (in progress^[when?])

Cluster architecture

A typical Grid Engine cluster consists of a master host, and one or more execution hosts. Moreover, multiple [shadow masters] can be configured as hot spares, which take over the role of the master when the original master host crashes.^[15]

Support and training

Sun provided support contracts for the commercial version of Grid Engine on most UNIX platforms and Windows.^[16] Professional services, consulting, training, and support were provided by Sun Partners.^[17] Sun partners with Georgetown University to deliver Grid Engine administration classes.^[18] The Bioteam runs short SGE training workshops that are 1 or 2 days long.^[19]

Users obtained community support on the Grid Engine mailing lists.^[20] Grid Engine Workshops were held in 2002, 2003, 2007, and 2009 in Regensburg, Germany.^[21]

Users

Notable deployments of SGE include:

• Sun Grid
• the TSUBAME supercomputer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology,^[22] which was number 7 on June 2006 TOP500 list.
• Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Ranger has 62,976 processor cores in 3,936 nodes and a peak performance of 504TFlops.^[23][24] Ranger was the 4th most powerful TOP500 supercomputer in 2008.^[25]
• San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
• Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (NOAA GFDL)

History

In 2000, Sun acquired Gridware, Inc. a privately owned commercial vendor of advanced computing resource management software with offices in San Jose, Calif., and Regensburg, Germany.^[26] Later that year, Sun offered a free version of Gridware for Solaris and Linux, and renamed the product Sun Grid Engine.

In 2001, Sun made the source code available,^[27] and adopted the open source development model. Ports for Mac OS X and *BSD were contributed by the non-Sun open source developers.^[28]

In 2010, after the purchase of Sun by Oracle, the Grid Engine 6.2 update 6 source code was not included with the binaries, and changes were not put back to the project's source repository. In response to this, the Grid Engine community started the Open Grid Scheduler project to continue to develop and maintain a free implementation of Grid Engine. ^{[29] [30][31]}

On January 18, 2011, it was announced that Univa had recruited several principal engineers from the former Sun Grid Engine team and that Univa would be developing their own forked version of Grid Engine. The newly announced Univa Grid Engine will include commercial support and would compete with the official version of Oracle Grid Engine.^[32][33][34]

Other Grid Engine based products

• Sun Constellation System
• Sun Visualization System
• Sun Compute Cluster ^[35]
• ClusterVisionOS Distribution
• Rocks Cluster Distribution
• gLite produced for the European Grid Infrastructure, as part of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project^[36]
• Univa's UniCluster Express
• Univa Grid Engine
• BioTeam's iNquiry
• Nimbus - uses Grid Engine as a virtual machine scheduler in a cloud computing environment

Add-on software

A number of SGE add-ons are available:

• Solaris Cluster integration ^[37]
• Service Domain Management module in order to meet service level objectives
• Transfer-queue Over Globus (TOG). Globus added support for Grid Engine in Globus Toolkit‎ 5.0.0 ^[38]
• JOb Scheduling Hierarchically (JOSH)

See also

Free software portal

• Sun Ops Center - Sun's datacenter automation tool
• Open Grid Forum

References

1. ^ Schwierskott, Andy (2010-12-24). "Go On and Good bye and Announcing Oracle Grid Engine 6.2 Update 7". http://markmail.org/thread/zlpfzzlfgbp7sd2x. 
2. ^ "Oracle Grid Engine". Oracle Corporation. 2010-05-303. http://www.sun.com/software/sge/. 
3. ^ "A Little History Lesson". Sun Microsystems. 2006-06-23. http://blogs.sun.com/templedf/entry/a_little_history_lesson. 
4. ^ "The Grid Engine Source License". Sun MicroSystems. 2010-06-04. http://gridengine.sunsource.net/license.html. 
5. ^ "Oracle Grid Engine". Oracle Corporation. 2010-07-26. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/tools/oracle-grid-engine-075549.html. 
6. ^ "A discussion at GridEngine forums". 2010-06-29. http://gridengine.sunsource.net/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=38&dsMessageId=264919&orderBy=createDate&orderType=desc. 
7. ^ "World's First Utility Grid Comes Alive on the Internet". Sun Microsystems. 2006-03-22. http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2006-03/sunflash.20060322.1.xml. 
8. ^ Specification: Resource Quota
9. ^ "Hedeby Project home". Sun Microsystems. http://hedeby.sunsource.net. Retrieved 2008-01-25. 
10. ^ "xml-qstat". olesenm.github.com. http://olesenm.github.com/xml-qstat/. Retrieved 2009-10-12. 
11. ^ "Long delay when submitting large jobs (mailing list message)". Sun Microsystems. http://gridengine.sunsource.net/servlets/ReadMsg?listName=users&msgNo=9446. Retrieved 2007-12-25. 
12. ^ "flex-grid". olesenm.github.com. http://olesenm.github.com/flex-grid/. Retrieved 2009-10-12. 
13. ^ "Olesen-FLEXlm-Integration". wiki.gridengine.info. http://wiki.gridengine.info/wiki/index.php/Olesen-FLEXlm-Integration. Retrieved 2007-12-25. 
14. ^ "LicenseJuggler". wiki.gridengine.info. http://wiki.gridengine.info/wiki/index.php/LicenseJuggler. Retrieved 2007-12-26. 
15. ^ "How to Install the Shadow Master Host". Sun Grid Engine 6.2u3 blog. August 27, 2009. http://wikis.sun.com/display/gridengine62u3/How+to+Install+the+Shadow+Master+Host. Retrieved October 6, 2011. 
16. ^ "Sun Store Grid Engine Entitlement Purchase". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on 2007-10-30. http://web.archive.org/web/20071030012101/http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=115672. Retrieved 2008-03-03. 
17. ^ "Sun Grid Engine 6 Partners". Sun Microsystems. http://www.sun.com/software/gridware/partners/index.xml. Retrieved 2007-12-14. 
18. ^ "Advanced Sun Grid Engine Configuration and Administration Class". Sun Microsystems. http://blogs.sun.com/templedf/entry/advanced_sun_grid_engine_configuration. Retrieved 2007-12-14. 
19. ^ "Training". The Bioteam Inc.. http://blog.bioteam.net/category/training/. Retrieved 2008-03-24. 
20. ^ "Grid Engine Mail Lists". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on December 25, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20081225034600/http://gridengine.sunsource.net/maillist.html. Retrieved October 6, 2011. 
21. ^ "Grid Engine Workshops". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on March 8, 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20090308083532/http://gridengine.sunsource.net/workshop.html. Retrieved October 6, 2011. 
22. ^ "Sun N1 Grid Engine Software and the Tokyo Institute of Technology Super Computer Grid". Sun Microsystems. http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0607/820-1695.html. Retrieved 2007-11-16. 
23. ^ "TACC > HPC Systems". The University of Texas at Austin. http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/resources/hpcsystems/#ranger. Retrieved 2007-12-13. 
24. ^ "More Ranger Facts and Figures". Sun Microsystems. http://blogs.sun.com/marchamilton/entry/more_ranger_facts_and_figures. Retrieved 2008-02-12. 
25. ^ "TOP500 List - June 2008". TOP500.Org. 2006-06-18. http://top500.org/list/2008/06/100. 
26. ^ "Gridware's resource management software increases efficiency and productivity in compute-intensive technical computing environments". Sun Microsystems. 2000-07-24. http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2000-07/sunflash.20000724.3.xml. 
27. ^ "Sun Microsystems makes SUN GRID ENGINE software available to open source community". Sun Microsystems. 2001-07-23. http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2001-07/sunflash.20010723.1.xml. 
28. ^ "Porting HPC Tools to FreeBSD". 2010-05-14. http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/schedule/events/169.en.html. 
29. ^ Open Grid Scheduler
30. ^ Eadline, Ph.D., Douglas (September 1, 2010). "The State of Oracle/Sun Grid Engine". Linux Magazine. http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7850. Retrieved 2011-01-18. 
31. ^ Templeton, Daniel (2010-12-23). "Changes for a Bright Future at Oracle". http://markmail.org/message/hcxond5s4cywe5dv. Retrieved 2011-01-19. 
32. ^ "Univa Acquires Grid Engine Expertise" (Press release). Univa. 2011-01-18. http://www.univa.com/about/news/press_2011/01172011.php. Retrieved 2011-01-18. 
33. ^ Feldman, Michael (2011-01-18). "Univa Rescues Grid Engine From Oracle". HPCwire. http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Univa-Rescues-Grid-Engine-From-Oracle-114140804.html. Retrieved 2011-01-18. 
34. ^ Morgan, Timothy Prickett (2011-01-18). "Univa forks Oracle's Sun Grid Engine". The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/18/univa_forks_oracle_grid_engine/. Retrieved 2011-01-18. 
35. ^ "Sun Compute Cluster Solution". Sun Microsystems. http://www.sun.com/servers/hpc/computecluster/index.jsp. 
36. ^ "Sun Grid Engine, a new scheduler for EGEE middleware". Imperial College. 2000-12-29. http://pubs.doc.ic.ac.uk/egee-sge-integration/. 
37. ^ "Installing and Configuring Sun Cluster HA for Sun Grid Engine". Sun Microsystems. 2008-02-15. http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-3064/cacjgdbc?a=view. 
38. ^ "GT 5.0.0 Release Notes". http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.0/execution/gram5/rn/. 

External links

• Oracle Grid Engine - Official Home Page
• gridengine.org Community: Home - Project page
• Open Grid Scheduler - Community homepage at SourceForge
• Sun Grid Engine - Official page for the commercial version
• Sun Grid Engine 6.0 Collection - Documentation Collection for Grid Engine 6.0
• Sun Grid Engine 6.1 Collection - Documentation Collection for Grid Engine 6.1
• Sun Grid Engine Information Center - Documentation Collection for Grid Engine 6.2
• gridengine.info - Unofficial Grid Engine resources blog
• wiki.gridengine.info - Unofficial Grid Engine resources wiki - including information about integration of applications
• "Understanding the differences between Grid Engine 5.3, 6.0 and Sun N1 Grid Engine 6 (N1GE 6)"
• flex-grid project page - FLEXlm integration for Grid Engine
• xml-qstat project page - Web based status monitoring of Grid Engine 6.x systems
• Good Tips - several blog entries on getting started with Grid Engine
• Grid Engine-Globus Toolkit adapter
• BinBase Cluster System - an API to access the SGE from java and run java based jobs on the cluster.
• Schedule::SGE - An API to access the SGE using Perl