Sun Grid Engine Package for OSCAR

Software deployment and maintenance is a hard problem, even more so when clusters and grids are involved. Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR) toolkit is used to install and maintain computing clusters. Grid and cluster software (such as Sun Grid Engine [SGE]) are often complex and huge. SGE is an open-source, community effort sponsored by Sun Microsystems, which offers distributed resource management via powerful queue configuration and job control capabilities. With the increasing adoption of clusters and grid computing, demand grows for mechanisms that facilitate easier installation and maintenance for popular software in this area. Adding SGE support in OSCAR allows cluster owners to realize maximum job throughput and utilize idling CPU cycles. As part of a winning proposal in Google’s Summer of Code 2005, we have developed a package for SGE as part of the OSCAR framework. This project was done with help from open source developers in SGE and OSCAR communities. As a result, a SGE package has been created, tested and made publicly available via OSCAR’s software repository. In this paper, we present the internals of and our experiences with this effort.