# Announcing Grid Engine version 5.3beta1

Grid Engine 5.3beta1 as mentioned here recently, is now ready. A corresponding source branch has been created and the binaries for all platforms we have access to have been compiled and are available from the download page.
Among other enhancements, Grid Engine 5.3beta1 provides the following improvements over the previous alpha1 version:

- A new Enterprise Edition dispatch algorithm is available improving the old dispatching scheme towards more intuitive and entitlement oriented results. The old dispatch algorithm is still available via a compatibility option. See the sge_conf(5) on-line manual page for more information.
- Various scalability enhancements have been made to enable the handling of larger numbers of jobs, hosts and queues. In particular, the performance of the scheduler component has been improved greatly.
- The spooling of array jobs has been optimized to allow higher numbers of tasks in a single array job.
- Several configuration parameters which formerly had to be set in the qmaster_params, schedd_params and execd_params lists are now an explicitly visible part of the cluster configuration (see sge_conf(5)). Examples are the FQDN parameter or the Reschedule Unknown field.
- Reschedule buttons have been added to the job and queue qmon dialogs to initiate rescheduling of jobs.
- Various bugs have been fixed. Among them:

- Job submission via qsub with empty job arguments does not crash grd_qmaster anymore.
- Enhanced qrsh to accept the -hold_jid and -h options.
- Huge fragmented array jobs no longer cause a qstat segmentation fault.
- Default limits are now in effect even if the corresponding complex attributes are not managed at a host or queue level.
- Fixed cases in which weird characters appear in the qmon scheduler configuration dialog; avoid corresponding segmentation violation.

Please note, that the included documentation has not yet been brought up-to-speed. The man pages are probably the most accurate piece but still contain known defficiencies. You should also refer to the HOWTOs and the application notes for further viable information.

Please help us improve the quality of Grid Engine and use the beta version as early as possible in your Grid Engine cluster.

## Still to come:

A beta2 phase will be coming in the January time-frame after further enhancements have been finished, added and tested. The final 5.3 release is tentatively planned for March/April 2002. Stay tuned!