Testimonials
Hearing that the core Grid Engine development team has landed in a new and supportive home is extremely exciting. Grid Engine's continued success depends heavily on the technology and support options available to the user community. Today's announcement is a huge boost to the community and also expands the choices available to those who need commercially licensed products. We are particularly excited that Univa plans to offer support options for the open source product. This satisfies a need we have long seen in our own market and is something that BioTeam will use quite heavily.
The impact of using poorly optimized technology can be measured in revenue or lost profits. Since the complexity of the data center has grown in a non-linear manner, it no longer makes sense to manually manage processes. Rather, the correct answer is to leverage policy; that is, to automate the correct lower-level events to occur in the right sequence, at the right time, at the right frequency, and only when necessary. Before one can automate there are many elements that must be integrated. We believe Univa's data center optimization approach can readily help companies achieve rapid ROI.
The integration of these key Grid Engine resources into Univa's workforce will further strengthen their already unique data center optimization offerings. Consider an optimization solution as a hierarchical pyramid of capabilities, where each level must be built to support the weight of the levels above it. With the acquisition of this solid Grid Engine foundation, the Univa solution is architected to bear the full weight of the optimization pyramid from the bottom level to the top, which incorporates the complex dynamics of the customer business itself.
What great news for the HPC community! Having been at Sun for many years and in fact having been involved in Sun's decision to acquire the Grid Engine technology and team, I am very aware of Grid Engine's value for HPC and its popularity within the community. That Grid Engine seemed destined to be absorbed into Oracle's vast commercial software stack with a decreasing focus on HPC generally and on Grid Engine's open source community in particular, seemed to spell the end of Grid Engine as a viable distributed resource manager for the HPC community. Univa's move has changed the Grid Engine landscape entirely, much in the same way that Whamcloud and ClusterStor (now part of Xyratex) have bolstered confidence in the future of the Lustre parallel file system. If Univa is going to deliver on its datacenter optimization vision, it needs a strong competency in distributed resource management and a firm and credible product and technology roadmap on which to base its offerings. The changes announced today are a very positive step in this direction, putting Univa in a strong position to deliver optimization solutions that span both bare metal and virtualized environments for HPC.
Univa wants Grid Engine to be extended and improved in ways that help HPC customers. And so, the company will be working with other Grid Engine community members to put together a new distribution and offer support on that as well as prior Grid Engine versions....Open Grid Scheduler sought to maintain the Grid Engine product and provide patches and updates, just like Univa is promising to do. The difference with Univa is that it has the tech people on staff who can credibly offer an alternative to what Oracle is doing. Or not doing, as the case may be....Univa also has a tool that converts the scripts used in Platform Computing's Load Sharing Facility (LSF)... so they can be run on Grid Engine. The conversion tool can emulate more than 100 LSF commands and convert them to the equivalent Grid Engine functions. This tool can port about 90 per cent of the LSF commands, says Tyreman, making it a lot easier for companies to jump from LSF to Grid Engine."