( ESNUG 377 Item 9 ) -------------------------------------------- [09/19/01]
Subject: ( ESNUG 375 #8 ) Free Sun GridWare Vs. Platform Computing's LSF
> Does anyone out in ESNUGland have experience with using Sun's Grid Engine
> software (http://www.sun.com/gridware) for managing EDA compute jobs and
> licenses? I used Platform Computing's Load Sharing Facility (LSF) at a
> previous employer and liked it, but my penny-pinching current employer
> likes the cost of GridWare: it's free. I'm not fond of the GridWare
> approach to license management and of course it only runs on Sun and Linux
> platforms so far. What other user's experiences with it?
>
> - [ Grid And Bear It? ]
From: Kathleen Rose <Kathleen.Rose@sun.com>
John,
The appplication license management of Sun Grid Engine is very similiar to
LSF Batch. In both products, a count is kept of how many free floating
licenses are available, and only that many jobs are dispatched. This is the
Shared Resources facility in LSF, and the Consumable Resources facility in
Sun Grid Engine. In both LSF and Sun Grid Engine an external program can
query FlexLM (via lmstat) and report actual license count, instead of a
fixed license count. This is called the elim in LSF, and the external load
sensor in Sun Grid Engine. This scheme is not perfect, and the writer is
perfectly justified in not liking it. But I would like to correct the
implication that they are vastly different approaches - they are not.
Sun Grid Engine has been a commercial product, formerly known as CODINE, for
over 7 years. It mainly focused in Europe on high performance computing
before Sun bought Gridware. Regarding the Sun and Linux only comment,
Gridware had ported and sold CODINE on all of the major Unix platforms. Sun
will continue this through partners and the Grid Engine open source project.
In addition to free Sun Grid Engine on Solaris and Linux, Sun has a free web
based training course that can be accessed from www.sun.com/gridware. Also,
support for Grid is on http://supportforum.sun.com/gridengine. There are
app notes to step through exactly how to set up things plus there is a
newsgroup-like discussion forum that also can be searched. ESNUG readers
can get the unmodified opinions, reactions, etc. of the Gridware community
of users there.
- Kathy Rose
Sun Microsystems
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: [ Grid-aWare]
Hi John,
Please keep me anonymous please.
We've been using Gridware for the past 3-4 months on a large ASIC design
project. It does everything we need to do, however we have an administrator
to deal with setting up the queues and policies. To a "dumb" user like me
it was an efficient way to run a large amount of jobs over a mixed
Solaris/Linux environment.
- [ Grid-aWare]
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