History of Grid Engine
From Genias to Univa
In 1990, Wolfgang Gentzsch formed the company Genias Software in Neutraubling, Germany (near Regensburg) and initially focused on vectorizing and parallelizing technical and scientific application software code. Genias learned quickly that often code could be run "as is" distributed in a cluster to obtain the same result. A resource management tool was required. In 1991 Fritz Ferstl joined Genias as a lead developer and in 1992 began to work on resource management software called Codine, which was based on DQS from Florida State University. Fritz was instrumental in evolving Codine over the years and deriving GRD (Global Resource Director) in 1996. GRD was the result of collaboration between Genias, Raytheon and Instrumental Inc.
With GRD in hand, Genias’ business began to grow rapidly and in 1999 they merged with California-based Chord Systems and renamed the company GridWare. With the business scaling quickly they soon caught the attention of many and were acquired in August of 2000 by Sun Microsystems. That same year Sun renamed the product Grid Engine and released a free version for Solaris and Linux. In 2001, Sun released the source code thereby cementing the beginning of a rapid adoption phase for Grid Engine.
Being part of Sun created a number of opportunities and changes for the team. Fritz Ferstl was put in charge of the development of the business, while the company bundled the software with its leading server systems that shipped into Solaris strongholds - namely Financial Services, Semiconductor and Oil & Gas customers. As additional fuel, Sun provided free qualified courtesy binaries and offered superior community support to organizations that adopted Grid Engine. Many organizations began to use Grid Engine with the comfort that a multi-billion dollar company was supporting them.
The number of deployments of Grid Engine grew rapidly and surpassed 10,000 data centers when Oracle acquired Sun in January 2010. By the end of 2010, Oracle had closed the open source community, stopped shipping source code, increased the license fees and essentially eliminated the HPC business that Sun was famous for. Oracle's decisions created a vacuum in the market whereby organizations using Grid Engine were faced with decisions as a result.
In January of 2011, Univa announced that it had hired the core Grid Engine development team who had worked on Grid Engine for several years. Univa’s focus is on the future development of Grid Engine and has released Univa Grid Engine (now version 8.0) that includes long-desired features and hundreds of fixes.
The fact remains that there are choices. There are open source repositories from which to download the core Grid Engine version 6.2U5 plus some fixes, however, they do not offer global, enterprise-ready, commercial support (see here). Oracle continues to take orders but does not have an active HPC roadmap (see here). You can compare the versions and roadmap here.
Univa properly and effectively fills the vacuum created when Oracle stopped the free support of Grid Engine. Today, Univa employs the core development team and supports many of the most demanding and well known Grid Engine users.
View a sample of our customers here