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 Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from ...

computer cluster A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The comp ...

software system (otherwise known as a

batch-queuing system A job scheduler is a computer application for controlling unattended background program execution of jobs. This is commonly called batch scheduling, as execution of non-interactive jobs is often called batch processing, though traditional ''job ...

), acquired as part of a purchase of Gridware, then improved and supported by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

and later

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ...

. There have been open source versions and multiple commercial versions of this technology, initially from Sun, later from Oracle and then from Univa Corporation. On October 22, 2013 Univa announced it acquired the

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, co ...

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 Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

(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 The Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) is now a retired free and open source license, recognized as such by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Under SISSL, developers could modify and distribute source c ...

(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 High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

(HPC)

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study th ...

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 license A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both sourc ...

s. Grid Engine used to be the foundation of the

Sun Grid Sun Cloud was an on-demand Cloud computing service operated by Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle Corporation. The Sun Cloud Compute Utility provided access to a substantial computing resource over the Internet for US$1 per CPU- ...

utility computing Utility computing or The Computer Utility is a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a ...

system, made available over the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

in 2006, later becoming available in many other countries and having been an early version of a public

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...

facility predating AWS, for instance.

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. 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 In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

available, and adopted the open source development model. Ports for Mac OS X and *BSD were contributed by the non-Sun open source developers. 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. 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. 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. On Oct 22, 2013 Univa has announced that it had acquired the

and trademarks pertaining to the Grid Engine technology and that Univa will take over support for Oracle Grid Engine customers. In September 2020,

Altair Engineering Altair Engineering Inc. is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Troy, Michigan. It provides software and cloud solutions for simulation, IoT, high performance computing (HPC), data analytics, and artific ...

, a global technology company providing solutions in data analytics, product development, and high-performance computing (HPC) acquired Univa.

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 spare A hot spare or warm spare or hot standby is used as a failover mechanism to provide reliability in system configurations. The hot spare is active and connected as part of a working system. When a key component fails, the hot spare is switched i ...

s, which take over the role of the master when the original master host crashes.

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 Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

platforms and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

. Professional services, consulting, training, and support were provided by Sun Partners. Sun partners with

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private research university in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll in 1789 as Georgetown College, the university has grown to comprise eleven undergraduate and graduate ...

to deliver Grid Engine administration classes. ''The Bioteam'' runs short SGE training workshops that are 1 or 2 days long. Users obtained community support on the Grid Engine mailing lists. Grid Engine Workshops were held in 2002, 2003, 2007, 2009, and 2012 in

Regensburg, Germany Regensburg or is a city in eastern Bavaria, at the confluence of the Danube, Naab and Regen rivers. It is capital of the Upper Palatinate subregion of the state in the south of Germany. With more than 150,000 inhabitants, Regensburg is the ...

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 Visualization System was a sharable visualization product introduced by Sun Microsystems in January 2007. It used other Sun technologies, including Sun servers, Solaris, Sun Ray Ultra-Thin Clients, and Sun Grid Engine. The Sun Visualization S ...

* Sun Compute Cluster * ClusterVisionOS Distribution *

Rocks Cluster Distribution Rocks Cluster Distribution (originally NPACI Rocks) is a Linux distribution intended for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. It was started by National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the San Diego Supercompute ...

* Univa's UniCluster Express * Univa Grid Engine * Some Grid Engine - active free fork of Sge with "some" further modifications, Michigan Neuroscience Institute, University of Michigan (2021). * Son of Grid Engine - inactive free fork of Sge with some enhancements, University of Liverpool, default Uubuntu/CentOS/RHEL gridengine package (2021). * BioTeam's iNquiry *

Nimbus Nimbus, from the Latin for "dark cloud", is an outdated term for the type of cloud now classified as the nimbostratus cloud. Nimbus also may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Halo (religious iconography), also known as ''Nimbus'', a ring of ligh ...

- uses Grid Engine as a virtual machine scheduler in a cloud computing environment

References

{{Oracle FOSS Sun Microsystems software Job scheduling Parallel computing Grid computing Cross-platform software Cluster computing 2001 software Sun Microsystems acquisitions

History

Cluster architecture

Support and training

Other Grid Engine based products

See also

References