By Steve Fisher, Editor -- Last week, Sun Microsystems, Inc. introduced Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition 5.3 software. The software promises higher levels of control and flexibility and incorporates new policy management functions to allow multiple groups to easily share compute resources. To learn more, Supercomputing Online interviewed John Tollefsrud, Grid Marketing Manager, Sun Microsystems.

SCO: Please give us some details on Sun’s Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition. TOLLEFSRUD: Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition is our next-generation grid technology for enterprise grids. So far most grids have been used for single projects or by a single team—as a cluster grid. Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition allows businesses to pool the resources of multiple cluster grids within an organization into an enterprise grid. So it’s a great tool to extend the benefits of grid computing—the increased resource utilization, increased productivity and efficiency across an organization. But of course, bringing together different groups, you encounter the problem of sharing. No one wants to give up his resources without the assurance that he’s going to get them back. What Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition offers is policy management functionality which ensures that resources are being shared equitably. It also enables organizations to align resource utilization with its business goals. So if one given project will yield more revenue or is more strategically important, a set percentage of the available resources can be directed to that project and the remainder doled out to other projects. SCO: How does it differ from past editions of Sun’s Grid Engine? TOLLEFSRUD: This is the first release of Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition, and it represents a major advance in Grid Engine technology. The biggest change from past versions is that Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition adds policy management functions that allow multiple grids within an organization to share compute resources according to business goals. With hierarchical fair-share scheduling for all enterprise resources, and furthermore deadline scheduling, the policy module of Enterprise Edition is he very first of its kind to map resource utilization to one-to-one corporate goals. By providing increased resource utilization in a grid environment, Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition allows for the reallocation of a grid’s entire compute resources on the fly to meet constantly changing compute power needs within an organization. SCO: How does it compare to competitive offerings from other firms? TOLLEFSRUD: Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition is the only enterprise grid product available from a large systems vendor. Additionally, it’s currently the only distributed resource manager that enables enterprises to run their grids in a proactive and transparent way, maintaining the desired level of quality of service. Furthermore, it belongs to an integrated suite of interoperable grid products that address grid technology on all levels - cluster, enterprise, Internet - and is available today for production environments. Sun Grid Engine users have benefited for years from the technology’s groundbreaking architecture that separated master and scheduling functions into optimized processes. While competitive products are now beginning to emulate this high performance, highly scalable approach, Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition advances the “state of the art” once again by providing fine grain control of all tasks running in the grid, even balancing runtime CPU allocation for each process in order to provide the highest possible quality of service. No other product offers this combination of performance, scalability and “data center” capabilities. SCO: Please tell us about Sun’s roadmap for future technology in grid computing. TOLLEFSRUD: Today Sun is working with its enterprise customers to ensure that increasingly complex applications can be managed by enterprise grids, and further down the road will continue its efforts to enhance the integration of Web services into grid environments to move towards global grids. Another area Sun will explore is the expansion of the utility model for grid computing. Overall, Sun will continue to work towards its goal of providing academic institutions and enterprises with the compute resources they need on demand. Sun is also working on standards efforts, like the Distributed Resource Management Application API, and is involved with Globus and the Global Grid Forum in developing solutions for the future of grid computing. SCO: Your press release mentions that the Grid Engine software powers 5,000 cluster and enterprise grids worldwide today. What and where are say, Sun’s three biggest? TOLLEFSRUD: One of the largest is the Army Research Lab which has over 2,000 CPUs in an enterprise grid. ARL manages and provides resources in a heterogeneous grid environment for several research labs within the U.S. military. Ford Motor Company, Powertrain Division uses 1,000 CPUs in an innovative desktop-based grid for MCAD/MCAE work, where systems are repurposed ‘on-the-fly’ between interactive and number-crunching tasks. Synopsis uses Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition to manage a grid dedicated to software development, where the policy system is used to support a matrix of objectives across several development teams. What’s really more interesting than the number of CPUs is the increasing number of organizations that are deploying grids with Sun Grid Engine technology. We’ve seen a 20% increase in organizations deploying Sun grids in the last seven months. What we’re seeing is the movement of grid computing into the mainstream. It really is exciting to be with these customers at front of the next wave of computing innovation. SCO: Your press release also mentions “70 new grid deployments each week.” How was that adoption rate calculated? TOLLEFSRUD: The 70 new grid deployments each week comes from a survey conducted by Walker Information, Inc. The survey also shows that about half of the 5,000 Sun grids, about half are running on Solaris, 25% are running on Linux, and 25% are running in a mixed Solaris/Linux environment. SCO: Sun sponsors the Grid Engine Open Source Project. Please tell the readers a bit about that and how things have been going. TOLLEFSRUD: The Grid Engine Project is an open source initiative sponsored by Sun and hosted by CollabNet, to which Sun has made available the 500,000-plus lines of Grid Engine source code under the SISSL open source license. We’ve got a growing community there of hundreds of members, with over 10,000 downloads from the project site, over a quarter million page hits. Sun’s engineering staff work as part of this community on the front end of development of Grid Engine technology. It’s the place to get Grid Engine courtesy binaries for AIX, HP/ux, IRIX, Tru64, and of course Linux and Solaris. Sun is committed to furthering the development of grid computing technology in an open process, and the Grid Engine Project is one way we’re making that happen. It’s all at www.gridengine.sunsource.net. SCO: Is there anything you’d like to add? TOLLEFSRUD: While we share the excitement of our academic and research customers doing innovative work across global grids, in many ways the real action for grid computing will continue to be at the cluster and enterprise grid level for the next few years. We’ve got these 5,000 organizations using Sun Grid Engine and reaping the benefits at the department level, and now half of these users are ready to investigate taking this up a level and across the organization. They appreciate that with this technology they are getting to market quicker, they are out-innovating their competition, they are getting more and more out of their resource investments. As the security and reliability concerns of enterprises are met over the next several years for global grid computing approaches, we’ll see a emergence of utility-computing, Internet-based grid computing in a web services context. And just as Sun has been there to provide the tools for this fantastic buildout of cluster and enterprise grids, we’ll be there to enable our customers to leverage all the potential of the global grid.