Goodbye GridEngine ...

Well, sort of. Its morphed, into something not quite open source, with not enough of a community around it to sustain it from a development sense, as the corporate owner goes their own direction. I understand their decision, and I respect it … its their (Oracle’s) IP. I don’t have to like it though. So we are migrating our internal queueing to Torque for the moment. Thinking about Slurm. Basically all of this will be hidden behind some of our tools, but still … we’ve been using SGE since before it was Sun’s (or Grid Engine). Back in the Codiene days. Heck, I’ve got a tarball of NQS source (one of the original bases for this) around somewhere on some medium (likely unreadable now … all them 4mm DAT tapes, and no tape reader … hmmmm) Torque for now, and will evaluate others. For a long time I’ve thought of writing my own. Integrating it tightly within Tiburon and other tools (DragonFly). Heck, DragonFly has the rudiments of a good scheduler in it, all thats left is some business rules, some logic for other things … But there’s really no significant business model I can justify to invest in this, so its a pet project, and I’ll leverage the other open source bits until such a time as they become painful. DragonFly does have some very sweet capabilities vis-a-vis execution in a cloud, even without a scheduler. Might be time to leverage that aspect, and someone elses scheduler underneath … if needed. BTW: I should note that OGE as it is called now is not dead, it is morphing. A real product, it has a real future, and that future is closed source. There is sOGE or son of Oracle Grid Engine. Open source but they cant get more than cursory participation from the rest of the Oracle staff. I’d have liked to have seen them call it OGrE or similar. Would have been a cool name :D