Amongst many product releases and updates from the Sun camp this week at ISC, they’ve also announced the latest version of their popular batch scheduler, Grid Engine. The new version, 6.2u3, features the normal set of bug fixes and introduces several wicked cool features. New features include:
.: Amazon EC2 Adapter: The Service Domain Manager (SDM) adds connectivity to Amazon Elastic Cloud EC2 and the ability to flexibly add execution hosts as needed on demand.
.: Initial Power Saving Support: A new power saving scheme in SDM enables the creation of a special resource spare pool in which systems can be powered on or off when added or removed from this spare pool.
.: SDM Simple Install: It is now possible to install and run an SDM system with only one JVM per (managed or master) host. Previously, the system was using up to three separate JVMs per host. This new feature simplifies installation, configuration and maintenance.
.: SGE Inspect: A new Java based Sun Grid Engine Inspect module allows to monitor SGE clusters and the Service Domain Manager (SDM). The similarity to VisualVM or Netbeans is not coincidental.
.: Exclusive Host Scheduling: Exclusive host scheduling allows users to request that jobs and parallel tasks run exclusively on a host if allowed by an administrator.
.: Microsoft Windows Vista Display Support: The display_win_gui feature is now fully supported. This feature allows a job to launch a GUI on the currently visible desktop on the Windows host that displays job information. This works only if the job is a native Windows application.
Sun has also changed the license and licensing scheme. Thanks to the Sun HPC Watercooler for pointing us over to Lubomir Petrik’s blog. For more details, read his full writeup here.