Announcing Grid Engine 6.2 Beta 2 Binaries

Regensburg, Germany -- June 18, 2008

Grid Engine 6.2 Beta 2 courtesy binaries are now ready for download.

Grid Engine 6.2, which has undergone significant changes in qmaster to significantly improve its scalability in challenging environments, adds powerful features to the core system, introduces multi cluster support for the Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo) and comes with a new module extending the scope of Grid Engine to a new domain of use cases: the Service Domain Manager (SDM), aka. project Hedeby allows to dynamically (re-)assign computational resources on demand.

The courtesy binaries are available at

The corresponding source code tag in the CVS repository has the name
         V62beta2_TAG
A snapshot of the sources is available at the Documents & Files page
        arco-V62beta2_TAG-src.tar.gz
        ge-V62beta2_TAG-src.tar.gz

The documentation and release notes are available at
        http://wikis.sun.com/display/GridEngine
       
A list of fixed problems since SGE 6.2 Beta is available at
        http://gridengine.sunsource.net/project/gridengine/62patches.txt
       

What's new in Grid Engine 6.2

1. Service Domain Manager
2. New in Grid Engine "core" and Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo)
3. Moving Grid Engine documentation set to http://wikis.sun.com

Service Domain Manager

This release adds a new module, extending the scope of Grid Engine to a new domain of use cases: The Service Domain Manager (SDM), aka. project Hedeby will allow to dynamically (re-)assign computational resources on demand through configurable SLOs (Service Level Objectives), measured by KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of the managed resources. Through adapters it will be possible to add virtually any type of service, be it for example a Grid Engine cluster, an application server farm, other types of Grid middle ware applications. Manageable resources can be e.g. physical or virtual hosts, software licenses.

This release of SDM will support to manage two or more Grid Engine clusters. Futures releases will add more adapters, add support for GreenIT (manage spare pools of resources). An integration with Sun's virtualization stacks is planned.

We welcome the active evaluation, feedback and contribution of our community to this project. See http://hedeby.sunsource.net for more information and mailing lists for discussion.

New in Grid Engine "core" and Accounting and Reporting console (ARCo)

• Scalability improvements - scale up to 63000 cores
• improved qmaster-execd protocol
• scheduler running as a thread in qmaster (faster communication between qmaster and scheduler threads) 
• improved resource matching in scheduler
• faster qmaster startup
• reduced memory requirements in big clusters
• Advance Reservation (AR)
• specified resources (e.g. machines, licenses) will be available for a guaranteed time window for specified users or user groups
• New implementation of Interactive Job Support (IJS)
• IJS is now natively implemented. No more need for external commands (rlogin, telnet, ssh)
• Array Job Interdependencies
• start task N of successor array job once predecessor array job task N has completed. Flexible definition of interdependencies possible
• Multi cluster support for Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo)
• collect data of multiple Grid Engine clusters in a single (physical) database
• do queries and get reports from single Web GUI from multiple ARCO databases
• ARCo scalability improvements
• improved dbwriter (component which writes Grid Engine reporting data into the database) speed
• improved speed of queries
• Improved ARCo installation experience
• the documentation on ARCo installation has been significantly improved
• Java Virtual Machine running as a thread in qmaster
• A JVM thread providing a JMX server allows to contact qmaster natively from Java applications (the API is not yet officially supported). The SDM uses the new JMX interface. 
•  Support for Solaris 10 startup scripts (SMF - Solaris Management Facility)
• Support for Sun Service Tags - inventory management through Sun Connected Services

Moving Grid Engine documentation set to http://wikis.sun.com

As one of the first products of Sun Microsystems the entire Grid Engine and
SDM documentation is provided in a wiki on http://wikis.sun.com.

By open sourcing Sun products, the closed and often slow way of providing
access to documentation to Sun customers and our communities is becoming
less adequate. With Grid Engine being one of Sun's first bigger products
which went open source, we are now taking the next step to modernize, ease
and speedup the access and contribution to our documentation set.

This enables quicker response to customer feedback (the Wiki provides a
feedback functionality which will be sent directly to the documentation
owners). The Wiki can be opened to interested users to allow directly
updating the content.