All,

James Carter has completed the upgrade of the SGE on the SEBASE Grid.  Oracle didn't make it as easy as they could have, so particular thanks are due to James for getting to the latest-and-greatest version.

Jan and I have ran some jobs on the upgraded Grid and found no problems, so to the best of our knowledge it is ready to be used.  However, please don't be surprised if minor problems crop up during the next few days.  If you find anything, please notify support (rather than this mailing list) so that it can be investigated.

So, some information about the upgrade:

(1) The Grid Engine is now at version 6.2u7, and it's now technically the Oracle Grid Engine.

(2) In addition, James has moved the SEBASE NAS (/n/sebase) to its 'final' physical location.  There's no change how you access it, but he tells me there might be a further performance improvement since it's now closer to the Grid nodes.

(3) James also moved the sge cluster directory to the SEBASE NAS from groupstore, to avoid the latter being a bottleneck in any manner.  In particular, the environment for the Grid (to use qsub etc.) is now configured by sourcing /n/sebase/sge-sebase/common/settings.sh  He's left a symbolic link at the old location, so this change should be transparent.  However, you should update any scripts, profiles etc. that use the groupstore location when you have a chance.

(4) The upgrade enables new methods of us being 'good citizens' in terms of sharing the resources between ourselves.  The change to the scheduling policy that Jan made last week is the primary method we will use as it handles most usage scenarios, and this is still in effect under the new SGE version.  One particular new feature that might also be useful is the ability to self-limit the number of cores used by large array jobs using the -tc switch to the qsub command, and I'm going to experiment with this over the next few days.

Thanks,

Simon

--
Simon Poulding

Lecturer in Enterprise Systems
Department of Computer Science
University of York
Deramore Lane
York YO10 5GH

Tel: +44 (0)1904 325165
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Email: smp@cs.york.ac.uk
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