Univa has announced that the principal engineers from the Sun/Oracle Grid Engine team, including Grid Engine founder and original project owner Fritz Ferstl, are joining the company and will immediately offer engineering support for existing Grid Engine deployments. Univa plans to release their own version of Grid Engine before the end of Q1 2011 and will concentrate on improving Grid Engine for technical computing and HPC while promoting the continuity of the Grid Engine open source community.
I think this is great news for the myriad of Grid Engine users out there. Not only will a Free version be maintained and improved, but solid support will be available from Univa as well.
As part of this announcement, Fritz Ferstl has been appointed Chief Technology Officer and will direct Univa’s technology strategy as well as lead the company’s growing EMEA business.
Combining the Grid Engine and Univa technology offerings was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the new Univa EMEA team and I just couldn’t miss,” said Ferstl. “Now we’ll be able to interact with and serve users worldwide investigating and understanding their data center optimization needs and providing the most innovative and enterprise-strength solutions to meet those needs.”
For its part, Oracle plans to take the Grid Engine code and make it part of its enterprise datacenter offerings. A webinar outlining these plans was posted here last week.
Update: Wolfgang Gentzsch, who sold the Gridware company and the original Grid Engine code to Sun Microsystems in 2000, provides his perspective over at HPC in the Cloud.
