# Grid Engine 5.3beta2 is now ready.

Regensburg, Germany -- February 15, 2002

The developers of the Grid Engine project finished their work for the Grid Engine 5.3beta2 milestone. This release has a couple of interesting enhancements compared to the beta1 milestone release. We would like to thank all users who provided their valuable feedback and who helped to improve this release.

It is planned that no new features will be added for the final release of Grid Engine 5.3. It's the intent that no spool file formats will be changed for the final version.

The following enhancements have been added to Grid Engine 5.3beta2:

> - The Array Job feature has been modified to be extremely memory efficient.

- The administrator can limit the size of array jobs as well as the number of array job tasks which can be instantiated (get running) per array job. It it thus possible to better control memory consumption and scheduling performance in case of large array jobs. See "max_aj_tasks" and "max_aj_instances" parameters in the sge_conf(5) manual page.

- The new "max_u_jobs" parameter (see sge_conf(5) manual page) allows to restrict the number of jobs a user can have in the system simultaneously.

- The queue parameter "starter_method" is now operational.
- The deletion of huge job lists has been improved (e.g. "qdel all" or "qdel -uall"). The shadow daemon now will not try to take over in such cases.

- The "qconf -clearusage" command allows to delete the usage for an entire sharetree back to zero (Enterprise Edition only).

- The new boolean "enforce_user" parameter (see sge_conf(5) manual page) allows to configure the system in a way that only users for who a user object has been created can submit jobs (Enterprise Edition only).
  The rationale of this feature is to allow an intuitive fair share scheduling among users in the same project of the sharetree if the "default" user leaf node has been configured below a project node.

- A "POLICY_HIERARCHY" parameter has been added (see schedd_conf(5) manual page). This allows to define a dependency chain among the four scheduling policies (Enterprise Edition only).

- The so called "loose" integration package with the Sun HPC Cluster Tools MPI implementation has been added to the Grid Engine distribution in `<sge_root>/mpi/hpc/loose-integration` (included in the "common" package).

- Scripts for updating from CODINE/GRD 5.0/5.1, SGE 5.2, SGE(EE) 5.3beta1 and scripts for updating to the "Enterprise Edition" mode have been added. See the file "doc/UPGRADE" in the "common" package or see

> > http://gridengine.sunsource.net/project/gridengine/howto/upgrade-2-53.txt

- An OpenSSL based security framework is now available optionally. Next week we plan to add a HOWTO to the web site which describes how to setup Grid Engine with this framework.
  The courtesy binaries are linked with the OpenSSL library. Therefore the size of the binaries and the initial memory size of the Grid Engine daemons and commands is now bigger. However, if the OpenSSL mode is not enabled (this is the default), there are no further additional memory requirements and no CPU consumption overhead when operating Grid Engine.

A couple of bugs and issues have been fixed in this release, among them are:

- Qmaster now works on hosts with dual network interfaces if the "host_aliases" file is used.
- The shadow deamon is not started multiple times in the same host if the startup script or the binary is started multiple times.

- When the shadow deamon now starts qmaster, the stderr/stdout out of qmaster startup is logged in a file.

- A "softstop" commandline parameter has been added to the Grid Engine startup script. If called with this argument, the sge_shepherd processes will not be killed.

- Fixed broken "qrsh -notify" option and "qrsh" handling of empty job arguments.

- Fixed broken "qselect -pe" when non existant PE was selected.

- To shutdown all execd's it's now necessary to add the reserved keyword "all" ("qconf -ke all").

- The output of "qconf -sep" now shows the number of processors correctly.

- "qstat -s" now shows the correct output.

The supported courtesy binaries provided by Sun Microsystems do not include anymore binaries for IBM AIX 4.2 and Digital Unix 4.0. Courtesy binary support for Linux/x86 for kernel 2.2.x with glibc 2.1.x already has been removed with Grid Engine 5.3beta1. However, the Sun Microsystems Grid Engine engineering team will continue to support through their development efforts these binary architectures for the life cycle of Grid Engine 5.3.

The included documentation has not yet been brought up-to-speed. The man pages are still the most accurate piece but still contain known deficiencies. You should also refer to the HOWTOs at

> http://gridengine.sunsource.net/project/gridengine/howto/howto.html

and the application notes at

> http://supportforum.sun.com/gridengine/appnotes.html

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.

The final SGE 5.3 release is tentatively planned for March/April 2002.