More popular grid software (ie. Globus) requires a
local scheduler. Even you have Globus installed, you
need SGE to handle the lower level stuff.
SGE -- Grid Engine -- is like the engine of your car,
it is not a car by itself, but it is one of the
important parts. (that's why it uses "Grid" in its
name)
BTW, SGE has a port for MacOSX, which is more powerful
than XGrid, but less user-friendly.
http://gridengine.sunsource.net/
Andrew.
--- "Jay A. Kreibich" <email@hidden> *:0T.'!G
> > Also SUN is calling their cluster software "Grid
> Engine". Must there be a
> > difference at all?
>
> There is definitely a blurring line between the
> two concepts--
> especially as low-cost cluster solutions that
> allow people to
> reconfigure and rebuild clusters fairly easily.
> It could be argued
> that these are not really formal, traditional
> clusters, however.
> The term "cluster" in the most formal CS sense of
> things, is a *lot*
> more than just a bunch of machines hooked
> together.
>
> I think Sun's use of the word "grid" comes from
> two things. First,
> what SGE (or whatever the new name is) allows you
> to do is not really
> in the realm of extremely formal clusters--
> especially from a company
> like Sun which has a serious investment in
> high-end machines and the
> HPC market. If you consider something like the
> IBM SP/* systems to
> be "clusters", then what SGE provides is much much
> less formal and
> organized. On the other hand, the SPs systems
> could really be viewed
> as more MPP systems than clusters because there is
> a fair amount of
> custom support hardware, but I'm not sure we need
> to go there.
>
> I'd also say that Sun was doing a bit of
> marketing, and grid has been
> a hot term the past few years, so there it is.
>
> It's also important to to realize that if you
> don't have extremely
> strict needs, and your problems are easily adopted
> to less rigid
> environments, then the difference between a
> cluster and a "well
> organized grid" is somewhat minimal. That's a big
> part of the reason
> that stuff like SGE is useful for less complex
> cluster tasks.
>
> > Maybe "Grid" is just a more common name nowadays
> than
> > "Beowulf" (for marketing reasons) and in the end
> it's describing the same
> > technics (from the point of hardware).
>
> Not really. The concepts of a cluster and a grid
> *are* different,
> although the edges are blurring, mostly because
> people don't have a
> good set of terms for the systems that are
> in-between-- and we're
> seeing more and more of those.
>
> > From the software view, you can have a Beowulf
> without any queuingsystem
> > at all (in the Beowulf book you mentioned I can't
> find any special
> > software for this purpose).
>
> I'm not sure I'd say that. For a Beowulf, there
> is some assumption
> that a single-system view is desirable-- for the
> user, if not for the
> admins and programmers. *Some* queue or DRM
> system is more or less
> required unless you have a very small system that
> is only used in an
> interactive fashion with literally only one user.
>
> "Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux (2E)" has
> several chapters on
> DRM/Queue systems, including whole chapters on
> Condor, Maui, and PBS,
> along with comments in many of the other chapters.
> The book
> definitely assumes you will have some kind of job
> management system
> on your cluster.
>
> > Just use PVM or MPI (or Linda) and you are the
> only user on the
> > whole cluster.
>
> Right, which is not the way most large compute
> resources work.
>
> -j
>
> --
> Jay A. Kreibich | Integration &
> Software Eng.
> email@hidden | Campus IT &
> Edu. Svcs.
> <http://www.uiuc.edu/~jak> | University of
> Illinois at U/C
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