Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Grid Engine Software?
How does the Sun Grid Engine software work?
What are the benfits of using the Sun Grid Engine software?
How can I learn more about how Sun Grid Engine is practically applied?
Which operating systems does the Sun Grid Engine support?
What are the benefits of using the Sun Grid Engine software in conjunction with the Solaris 10 Operating System?
How do I get started with using the Sun Grid Engine software?
What new features does Sun Grid Engine 6.2u2 provide?
Why had the documentation been moved to the wiki?
Where can I find documentation for older versions of the Grid Engine software?
 | For frequently-asked questions specific to the Accounting and Reporting Console, see ARCo Frequently-Asked Questions. |
Q: What is the Sun Grid Engine software?
A: The Sun Grid Engine software is a distributed resource management (DRM) system that manages the distribution of users' workload to available compute resources. For more information, see Getting Started.
Q: How does the Sun Grid Engine software work?
A: Users submit their work to the Sun Grid Engine software as jobs. The Sun Grid Engine software monitors the current state of all resources in the cluster and is able to assign these jobs to the best suited resources. The Sun Grid Engine software gives administrators both the flexibility to accurately model their computing environments as resources and to translate business rules into policies that govern the use of those resources. For more information, see How Resources Are Matched to Requests.
Q: What are the benefits of using the Sun Grid Engine software?
A: Compute resources in a typical data center have utilization rates that are on average 10%-25%. By installing and using the Sun Grid Engine software, it is possible to achieve resource utilization upwards of 80%, 90% or even 95%. This increase in utilization comes from the intelligent distribution of workload to the most appropriate available resources. Additional features like advance reservation and resource quota sets give users and administrators the ability to make the most of their compute resources.
Q: How can I learn more about how Sun Grid Engine is practically applied?
A: Sun Grid Engine users can be found within the public, private and nonprofit sectors in a variety of fields, including the following: technology, manufacturing, research, life sciences, and energy. For real life success stories on how Sun Grid Engine makes a difference throughout these industries, see Success Stories.
Q: Which operating systems does the Sun Grid Engine support?
A: The Sun Grid Engine software supports all of the major operating systems, including the Solaris Operating System, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, AIX, and HP-UX. For more information, see System Requirements.
Q: What are the benefits of using the Sun Grid Engine software in conjunction with the Solaris 10 Operating System?
A: The Sun Grid Software is able to take advantage of many of the unique features of the Solaris 10 Operating System, such as Zones, Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Service Tags, the Service Management Framework, etc. By placing the Sun Grid Engine master on a machine that is running the Solaris 10 Operating System, you increase the scalability of your cluster as well, making it easy to manage and maintain.
Q: How do I get started with using the Sun Grid Engine software?
A: See Getting the Software and Planning the Installation.
Q:What new features does Sun Grid Engine 6.2u2 provide?
ASun Grid Engine 6.2u2 includes the following features:
- GUI Installer – The GUI installer allows new users to more easily install the software and complements the existing CLI based installation routine. For more information, see Installing the Software With the GUI Installer.
- Increased Windows Support – Sun Grid Engine provides new support for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows Vista (Enterprise and Ultimate Edition), Windows Server 2003R2 and Windows Server 2008.
- Job Submission Verifier – A client and server side Job Submission Verifier (JSV) allows an administrator to control, enforce and adjust jobs requests, including job rejection. JSV scripts can be written in any scripting language,including Unix shells, Perl or TCL. For more information, see [Using the Job Submission Verifier.
- Increased Flexibility In Defining Consumable Resource Attributes – Consumable Resource attributes can now be requested per job. This makes resource requests for parallel jobs much easier to define, especially when using slot ranges.
- Increased Linux Functionality – On Linux, the use of the 'jemalloc' malloc library improves performance and reduces memory requirements. Additionally, the use of the poll(2) system call instead of select(2) on Linux systems improves scalability of qmaster in extremely huge clusters.
Q:Why had the documentation been moved to the wiki?
ASun Grid Engine is one of the first products at Sun to move the documentation for the entire software package to wikis.sun.com. The wiki platform facilitates the following benefits:
- Documentation becomes a living document.
- Product stakeholders can make immediate contributions, updates and corrections to the documentation.
- All Grid Engine are invited to the quality of the documentation by leaving comments.
- The wiki administrator can respond quickly to user feedback.
Q:Where can I find documentation for older versions of the Grid Engine software?
AFor information about earlier Grid Engine releases (before 6.2), see docs.sun.com:
- Sun N1 Grid Engine 6.1 - http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1017.4
- N1 Grid Engine 6.0 - http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1017.3
- Sun ONE Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition 5.3 - http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1017.2
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