Groups.grid.org

For a while now I have been thinking of how to make it easier for our customers and others to move from one batch system to another.   When I mention this idea to others they invariably say....'that shouldn't be too hard' but once you dig deeper you quickly realize that the three major batch systems out there SGE, PBS and LSF are very different and have gone in very different directions over time.So I have started to create a 'Migration Reference' document for migrating customers from a very well known Batch system to SGE (Sun Grid Engine).  I chose Sun Grid Engine for many reasons one that I really believe in is that Sun Grid Engine is Open Source - and UniCluster (my product) is also Open Source so the two fit well together.  The migration reference started out small but now I am up to 45 pages of discussion and differences between the two systems.  For example, the way batch systems treat prolog and epilog scripts is completely different so in the document I spend alot fo time discussing the differences between the two systems.  Core concepts like LSF resources and SGE Attributes are quite different, but once the two are described side by side it is pretty obvious that whatever can be done with LSF resources can also be done with SGE Attributes - especially on more modern versions of SGE such as 6.0 and later.In addition to the 'rather large' migration document we have identified other documents and tools that are needed to help users migrate they are: 

1. The Migration Reference (that is the doc I just descibed) 
2. A Migration Guide - describes starting with a cluster running another batch system and how to migrate to SGE.
3. Configuration file conversion tools - these tools read the configuration of a batch system then generate the appropriate SGE equivalents.
4. Batch submission wrapper scripts - this tool wraps the job submission tool and instead of calling the native batch system the job is actually submitted to SGE.

I think that this material is very useful for anyone who is considering a move.  They answer alot of common questions that I think will come up during a pilot migration project. Well that's all for now...I could write more but I have to go catch a plane..