May 1st was the revenue release (RR) for the Sun Grid Engine 6.1 product. Yes, the Sun Grid Engine product, without the "N1". With 6.1 we have dropped the "N1". Mostly. It will take a while for the name change to propogate all the way through the docs and file names.
Aside from the name change, 6.1 has a bunch of awesome new capabilities. The most important of those is resource quotas. Resource quotas allow administrators to place very fine-grained controls on resource using in the grid. The quotas can be defined for users, user groups, departments, projects, hosts, host groups, etc. With resource quotas, an administrator could, for example, create a rule that limits a user to running one job per host on machines not in his department, but that allows unlimited numbers of jobs on machines that his department owns. In addition, the resource quota configuration is based on common firewall configuration formats, making the configuration of resource quotas a familiar process for administrators who have ever configured a firewall.
Another big feature for 6.1 is full support of boolean operations when defining resource requirements for jobs. Previously we only supported the AND operation. Now we have full AND, OR, and NOT support. We do not, however, support grouping of terms, i.e. using parentheses, but thanks to De Morgan's laws, there's a work-around.
Also cool for 6.1 is the inclusion of an implementation of the DRMAA Java™ language binding specification 1.0. Technically, as I write this there isn't an official 1.0 spec yet, but there's a release candidate posted, and we have informal agreement that we'll promote it to 1.0. It's on my list to get the final, official 1.0 spec posted as soon as possible.
A really cool non-feature is that we're now offering 30 days of free email support for customers who download the product from the Sun Download Center and fill out a questionnaire. (You'll find a link to the questionnaire from the download page.) This is something brand new for us. We hope it will make the Sun Grid Engine "try and buy" experience much more pleasant.
At the same time, we have announced the availability of the Grid Engine 6.1 open source courtesy binaries. At this point, the only difference between the Grid Engine open source version and the Sun Grid Engine product is that the Windows binaries are not available in open source yet. We're working on it.
So, no excuses. If you've got 6.0 installed, go upgrade. The upgrade process from 6.0 to 6.1 should be pretty painless. If you haven't yet downloaded and installed Grid Engine, go grab the product binaries and give it a whirl!
