New Features in Sun N1 Grid Engine 6.1 Software

The Sun N1 Grid Engine 6.1 software includes several new features and expanded functionality.

Flexible Resource Quotas

The resource quotas feature enables you to limit the maximum number of running jobs per user, user group, and projects on arbitrary resources like queues, hosts, memory, and software licenses. A firewall-like rule syntax allows an unprecedented configuration flexibility.

For information about resource quotas, see Chapter 6, Managing Resource Quotas, in Sun N1 Grid Engine 6.1 Administration Guide. For additional details, see the qquota(1), sge_resource_quota(5), and qconf(1) man pages.

Master Bottleneck Analysis Using Solaris 10 DTrace

If your master component runs on a Solaris 10 machine, you can use the DTrace-based master monitor diagnosis utility to monitor the master and look for any bottlenecks. For more information, see Using DTrace for Performance Tuning in Sun N1 Grid Engine 6.1 Administration Guide and the $SGE_ROOT/dtrace/README-dtrace.txt file.

New Command Options

You can now use the-wd option to specify the job working directory for any of the following commands: qsub, qalter, qsh, qrsh and qmon. For more information, see the man pages.

Support for Additional Operating Systems

The Sun N1 Grid Engine 6.1 release adds support for the following operating systems:

• Linux on Itanium (IA64)

• Apple Mac OS X on the x86 platform

Support for Additional Database Software

ARCo supports the following database servers: PostgreSQL 7.4 - 8.2, MySQL 5.0, and Oracle 9i, 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2.

Other Changes

• Resource matching for string and host complex attributes has been extended to support a flexible boolean expression grammar (logical AND, OR and NOT operators).

• The Grid Engine Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo) now can write the reporting data to the MySQL database.

• You no longer need to set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Solaris and Linux when using N1 Grid Engine commands. This change improves command execution and helps to avoid conflicts with system installed shared libraries, such as SSL and Berkeley DB libraries.

• The complex variable display_win_gui now enables you to schedule jobs only to Windows hosts that are running the “N1 Grid Engine Helper Service.” The helper service allows background applications to display their graphical user interfaces on the visible desktop of the Windows host.

• Minor changes to QMON to improve usability.