Best Of Breed Batch Systems & Schedulers

[hanzl at noel.feld.cvut.cz]

> The two obvious batch system choices of which I am aware are Veridian's 
> OpenPBS and the Sun Grid Engine.
> ...
> What are the most viable projects in this field based on current features 
> AND the rate of development of patches, updates, and enhancements for 
> each?

I migrated from PBS to SGE some eight months ago.

For me the main advantage of SGE is fully devoted, quite responsive
and very friendly development team, probably having this opensource
project as their main (if not the only one) activity, being paid by
SUN but working according to the best opensource norms.

While SUN also provides commercial versions of SGE, these commercial
versions are merely opensource versions with commercial support. This
is very different from Veridian model, where the opensource and
non-opensource version compete and support team is in quite
problematic situation - the more problems they fix in opensource
version, the less money they get for the commercial version which
looses competitive advantage.

(Many big companies are trying to find ways to live in opensource
world, with very questionable results. SGE seemes to be quite a
success.)

Another difference was SGE qmon, graphical administration tool. While
I am no fan of visual environments (no kde, no gnome, quite spartan
fvwm2, emacs but never xemacs :), I quite appreciated qmon. It gives
very good overview of the whole system, and later you can use command
line tools where you want. PBS had similar tool, but mostly unusable
(I don't know current PBS situation).

In fact, I was reading PBS manuals forward and backward for few
months, but understood much less than with qmon and SGE manuals after
few weeks or maybe days. (And it may be my fault, of course.)

PBS probably still has much bigger user base. Given the dynamics I
observe, this is bound to change relatively soon.

SGE mirracle still depends on SUN fundings. Theoretically SUN may
abandon the project as they abandoned tcl/tk. But most likely they
will not abandon it soon, and later on SGE can survive by itself, as
tkl/tk survives.

Best Regards

Vaclav