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Oracle Grid Engine
Batch-queuing system for computer clusters

Oracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine (SGE), CODINE (Computing in Distributed Networked Environments) or GRD (Global Resource Director), was a grid computing computer cluster software system (otherwise known as a batch-queuing system), acquired as part of a purchase of Gridware, then improved and supported by Sun Microsystems and later Oracle. There have been open source versions and multiple commercial versions of this technology, initially from Sun, later from Oracle, then from Univa Corporation, and later from HPC Gridware as Gridware Cluster Scheduler. The open source version is still under active development under the SISSL license as Open Cluster Scheduler.

On October 22, 2013 Univa announced it acquired the intellectual property and trademarks for the Grid Engine technology and that Univa will take over support. Univa has since evolved the Grid Engine technology, e.g. improving scalability as demonstrated by a 1 million core cluster in Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced on June 24, 2018.

The original Grid Engine open-source project website closed in 2010, but versions of the technology are still available under its original Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). Those projects were forked from the original project code and are known as Son of Grid Engine, Open Grid Scheduler and Univa Grid Engine.

Grid Engine 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.

Grid Engine used to be the foundation of the Sun Grid utility computing system, made available over the Internet in the United States in 2006, later becoming available in many other countries and having been an early version of a public cloud computing facility predating AWS, for instance.

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History

In 2000, Sun acquired Gridware a privately owned commercial vendor of advanced computing resource management software with offices in San Jose, Calif., and Regensburg, Germany.12 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,13 and adopted the open source development model. Ports for Mac OS X and *BSD were contributed by the non-Sun open source developers.14

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.15 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.161718

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 did include commercial support and would compete with the official version of Oracle Grid Engine.192021

On October 22, 2013 Univa has announced that it had acquired the intellectual property and trademarks pertaining to the Grid Engine technology and that Univa will take over support for Oracle Grid Engine customers.22

In September 2020, Altair Engineering, a global technology company providing solutions in data analytics, product development, and high-performance computing (HPC) acquired Univa.23

2023 the lead developers of Sun Grid Engine, Oracle Grid Engine, Univa Grid Engine and successor decided to build Gridware Cluster Scheduler(GCS) based on their open source Open Cluster Scheduler which is 100% "SGE" backward compatible.24

Cluster architecture

A typical Grid Engine cluster consists of a master host and one or more execution hosts. Multiple shadow masters can also be configured as hot spares, which take over the role of the master when the original master host crashes.25

Support and training

Univa is providing commercial support and training for Univa Grid Engine and Oracle Grid Engine. Below is a description of some of the historic options.

Sun provided support contracts for the commercial version of Grid Engine on most UNIX platforms and Windows.26 Professional services, consulting, training, and support were provided by Sun Partners.27 Sun partners with Georgetown University to deliver Grid Engine administration classes.28 The Bioteam runs short SGE training workshops that are 1 or 2 days long.29

Users obtained community support on the Grid Engine mailing lists.30 Grid Engine Workshops were held in 2002, 2003, 2007, 2009, and 2012 in Regensburg, Germany.31

Other Grid Engine based products

The below contains historic information and some of the products and solutions are no longer available:

  • Sun Constellation System
  • Sun Visualization System
  • Sun Compute Cluster32
  • ClusterVisionOS Distribution
  • Rocks Cluster Distribution
  • Univa's UniCluster Express
  • Univa Grid Engine
  • Some Grid Engine33 – active free fork of SGE with "some" further modifications, Michigan Neuroscience Institute, University of Michigan (2021).
  • Son of Grid Engine34 – inactive free fork of SGE with some enhancements, University of Liverpool, default Ubuntu/CentOS/RHEL gridengine package (2021).
  • Open Cluster Scheduler35 – active free fork based on the Univa Open Core Grid Engine, which in turn is based on the open source Sun Grid Engine (2025).
  • BioTeam's iNquiry
  • Nimbus – uses Grid Engine as a virtual machine scheduler in a cloud computing environment

See also

  • Free and open-source software portal

References

  1. "Oracle Grid Engine". Oracle Corporation. 2010-05-30. http://www.sun.com/software/sge/ ↩

  2. "A Little History Lesson". Sun Microsystems. 2006-06-23. http://blogs.sun.com/templedf/entry/a_little_history_lesson ↩

  3. "Sun snaps up software company Gridware - CNET". https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-snaps-up-software-company-gridware/ ↩

  4. "Open Cluster Scheduler Github Repository". 2024-12-01. Retrieved December 1, 2024. https://github.com/hpc-gridware/clusterscheduler ↩

  5. "Univa Completes Acquisition of Grid Engine Assets, Becoming the Sole Commercial Provider of Grid Engine Software". Univa Corporation. 2013-10-22. http://www.univa.com/about/news/press_2013/10222013.php ↩

  6. "Univa Demonstrates Extreme Scale Automation by Deploying More Than One Million Cores in a Single Univa Grid Engine Cluster using AWS". Univa. 2018-06-24. Retrieved June 24, 2018. https://blogs.univa.com/2018/06/univa-demonstrates-extreme-scale-automation-by-deploying-more-than-one-million-cores-in-a-single-univa-grid-engine-cluster-using-aws/ ↩

  7. "The Grid Engine Source License". Sun MicroSystems. 2010-06-04. Archived from the original on 2013-11-12. Retrieved 2013-10-23. https://web.archive.org/web/20131112013604/http://arc.liv.ac.uk/repos/darcs/sge/LICENCES/SISSL ↩

  8. "Son of Grid Engine". University of Liverpool. Archived from the original on 26 August 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210826220245/https://arc.liv.ac.uk/trac/SGE ↩

  9. "Open Grid Scheduler". The Open Grid Scheduler Community. http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/ ↩

  10. "Univa Grid Engine". Univa. https://github.com/gridengine/gridengine/ ↩

  11. "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 ↩

  12. "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 ↩

  13. "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 ↩

  14. "Porting HPC Tools to FreeBSD". 2010-05-14. http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/schedule/events/169.en.html ↩

  15. Eadline, Douglas. "Grid Engine: Running on All Four Cylinders » ADMIN Magazine". ADMIN Magazine. Retrieved 2021-03-05. http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/Grid-Engine-Running-on-All-Four-Cylinders ↩

  16. Open Grid Scheduler http://sourceforge.net/projects/gridscheduler/ ↩

  17. Eadline, Ph.D., Douglas (September 1, 2010). "The State of Oracle/Sun Grid Engine". Linux Magazine. Archived from the original on September 4, 2010. Retrieved 2011-01-18. https://web.archive.org/web/20100904040116/http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7850 ↩

  18. Templeton, Daniel (2010-12-23). "Changes for a Bright Future at Oracle". Retrieved 2011-01-19. http://markmail.org/message/hcxond5s4cywe5dv ↩

  19. "Univa Acquires Grid Engine Expertise" (Press release). Univa. 2011-01-18. Archived from the original on 2011-01-21. Retrieved 2011-01-18. https://web.archive.org/web/20110121055558/http://univa.com/about/news/press_2011/01172011.php ↩

  20. Feldman, Michael (2011-01-18). "Univa Rescues Grid Engine From Oracle". HPCwire. Archived from the original on 2011-01-24. Retrieved 2011-01-18. https://web.archive.org/web/20110124052006/http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Univa-Rescues-Grid-Engine-From-Oracle-114140804.html ↩

  21. Morgan, Timothy Prickett (2011-01-18). "Univa forks Oracle's Sun Grid Engine". The Register. Retrieved 2011-01-18. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/18/univa_forks_oracle_grid_engine/ ↩

  22. "Univa Completes Acquisition of Grid Engine Assets, Becoming the Sole Commercial Provider of Grid Engine Software". Univa Corporation. 2013-10-22. http://www.univa.com/about/news/press_2013/10222013.php ↩

  23. "Altair Acquires Univa". September 14, 2020. https://atc2020.virtual.altair.com/ ↩

  24. "HPC Gridware Github Repository". 2024-12-01. Retrieved December 1, 2024. https://github.com/hpc-gridware ↩

  25. "How to Install the Shadow Master Host". Sun Grid Engine 6.2u3 blog. August 27, 2009. Archived from the original on October 2, 2011. Retrieved October 6, 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20111002183423/http://wikis.sun.com/display/gridengine62u3/How+to+Install+the+Shadow+Master+Host ↩

  26. "Sun Store Grid Engine Entitlement Purchase". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on 2006-11-13. Retrieved 2008-03-03. https://web.archive.org/web/20061113110525/http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=115672 ↩

  27. "Sun Grid Engine 6 Partners". Sun Microsystems. Retrieved 2007-12-14. http://www.sun.com/software/gridware/partners/index.xml ↩

  28. "Advanced Sun Grid Engine Configuration and Administration Class". Sun Microsystems. Retrieved 2007-12-14. http://blogs.sun.com/templedf/entry/advanced_sun_grid_engine_configuration ↩

  29. "Training". The Bioteam Inc. Retrieved 2008-03-24. http://blog.bioteam.net/category/training/ ↩

  30. "Grid Engine Mail Lists". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on December 25, 2008. Retrieved October 6, 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20081225034600/http://gridengine.sunsource.net/maillist.html ↩

  31. "Grid Engine Workshops". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on March 8, 2009. Retrieved October 6, 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20090308083532/http://gridengine.sunsource.net/workshop.html ↩

  32. "Sun Compute Cluster Solution". Sun Microsystems. http://www.sun.com/servers/hpc/computecluster/index.jsp ↩

  33. "Some Grid Engine". Michigan Neuroscience Institute, University of Michigan. https://github.com/daimh/sge ↩

  34. "Son of Grid Engine". University of Liverpool. Archived from the original on 26 August 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210826220245/https://arc.liv.ac.uk/trac/SGE ↩

  35. "Open Cluster Scheduler". HPC-Gridware GmbH. https://github.com/hpc-gridware/clusterscheduler ↩