Features and Platform Support

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• Priority and Utilization Policies
  Grid Engine delivers multiple scheduling policies for matching workload in the cluster to business and organizational objectives such as maximizing utilization across all machines, reducing turnaround time for jobs in the cluster, or prioritizing workload according to group, department or company affiliation.

• Dynamic Resource Management
  Grid Engine continuously collects metrics from all cluster nodes, then uses scheduling strategies configured by the administrator to evaluate all pending workload and match specific job requirements to available resources.
• Resource Capacity Management
  All resources in a data center or cluster are finite and must be effectively shared. Grid Engine provides powerful and flexible resource capacity control for all shared resources, including applications and licenses. Resource Quota Sets further refine the level of control for sharing resources among users, groups and departments.
• Scalability
  Grid Engine can scale to a cluster of 64,000 cores or more in a single managed environment. A single Grid Engine cluster can contain more than 4,000 nodes, and additional Grid Engine clusters can also be added to extend scalability to 10,000 or more nodes in a multi-cluster environment.
• Performance
  With Grid Engine, performance scales seamlessly and efficiently as the cluster grows in size. Grid Engine can accept over 100 jobs per second, and using the DRMAA interface a 1,000-job/second submission rate can be achieved. The Grid Engine scheduler can be configured as the cluster grows in size and number of jobs to ensure minimal time is spent scheduling and dispatching jobs to individual cluster hosts. Performance optimization is built into every aspect of Grid Engine, from fast system startup times even with multiple 100K jobs in the system to dispatching and running extremely large-scale parallel jobs across 64,000 cores and more.
• Nonstop Cluster Reconfiguration
  Production clusters cannot afford to stop or suspend work for cluster modification. With Grid Engine all cluster configurations and parameters can be modified and machines can be added or removed while Grid Engine continues to run.
• Flexible Workload Types
  Grid Engine supports many different workload types so a wide variety of jobs can be scheduled and run efficiently in the cluster. Most applications can run in a sequential fashion; however, some specialized applications may require either a parametric workload type for simple parallel applications or full parallel workload type for applications that need message passing. Interactive jobs can be submitted to Grid Engine providing a remote shell to the user while at the same time enforcing Grid Engine scheduling and policy control.
• Multi-Core Processor Binding
  With the advent of NUMA, multi-core machines scheduling effectively to a single processor requires binding the job to specific processors or cores on the machine. Grid Engine provides superior flexibility in assigning jobs to specific cores, improving the overall utilization and runtime for most jobs.
• Security
  Grid Engine can be configured to encrypt all data being transferred among Grid Engine components running on the cluster nodes. Using this secure mode, Grid Engine can also verify user certificates and ensure that components have not been tampered with by potential attackers.
• Advance Reservation
  Reservations can be made to reserve Grid Engine cluster resources (such as CPU, memory, job slots or applications) for a future time and date. This feature is invaluable for cluster administrators and power users to reserve portions of the cluster for maintenance, parallel jobs or very high priority workload.
• Hybrid Cloud Enablement
  Grid Engine is fully integrated with UniCloud, providing functionality to seamlessly extend a Grid Engine cluster to an external cloud computing service such as Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud. It is fast and easy to create a Grid Engine cluster that runs in the public cloud or to establish a secure hybrid cloud that contains machines from your environment and the public cloud provider.

Supported Architecture and Operating Systems

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