Lubomir Petrik's Weblog

The new product update of the Sun Grid Engine is now available. It's called simply Update  2, but in addition to many bug fixes, it includes following new features:

GUI Installer

It allows an easy interactive installation of a whole cluster.

See more on the Installing With GUI Installer page.

Microsoft Windows Vista Support

New support for Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise and Ultimate Edition, Windows Server 2003R2 and Windows Server 2008, both 32 and 64-bit versions).

Job Submission Verifier (JSV)

JSVs allow users and administrators to define rules that determine which jobs are allowed to enter into a cluster and which jobs should be rejected immediately. A JSV is a script or binary that can be used to verify, modify, or reject a job during the time of job submission or on the master host.

See more on the Using Job Submission Verifiers wiki page or jsv man page.

Consumable Resource per Job

Consumable complex attributes can now be configured as per job. Such consumables are consumed as requested and are no longer multiplied by the requested slots. This makes resource requests for parallel jobs much easier to define, especially when using slot ranges.

See more on the Defining Consumable Resources page (Multiplied Resource Requests Versus Non-Multiplied Resource Requests) or complex man page (look for consumable section).

Jemalloc Library (on Linux x64)

Most Linux distributions come with a default memory allocator library which is not as efficient as the open source jemalloc memory allocator library, developed by Jason Evans for FreeBSD 7, and also used by the Firefox 3. Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2 replaces the native Linux malloc library with the jemalloc library on x64 platforms. This has a positive effect on the master host performance in large and high throughput Sun Grid Engine clusters on Linux x64 and reduces the memory footprint up to 20% leading to a significant performance increase.

As always, you may test this release in parallel with your old cluster to try out the new features. Optionally, you may use the upgrade procedure (clone configuration method) to install SGE 6.2u2, while keeping all your other cluster configuration settings. See the upgrade video. While the video shows an upgrade from 6.1 to 6.2, it will work the same way for cloning any 6.0u2 or later to 6.2u2.

Additional links:

Download page
Wiki documentation
Release notes
Fixed bugs
Patch matrix