Univa Grid Engine 8.4.1 Released (2016-07-19)

Univa Grid Engine 8.4.1 was released by Univa’s engineering team last week. This is the first update for the major 8.4 release which brings in main fixes as well as new capabilities.

The major feature introduced in 8.4 is native Docker support. Native Docker support of Univa Grid Engine means that Docker enabled hosts are automatically discovered (without any configuration needed by the admin) and the installed images are forwarded to the global scheduler of Univa Grid Engine. The user just needs to select a image name and then its job script or binary is executed on an selected execution host within the automatically created Docker container. Since the Docker containers are not anymore child processes of UGE and therefore not directly supervised by Univa Grid Engine (for accounting and resource limitation for example) a new process is injected in the container which supervises the job within the container as Univa Grid Engine does it for jobs outside of a container. Working directories and job spooling directories are automatically mounted inside the container.

Univa Grid Engine 8.4.1 adds now capabilities to launch containers with all the parameters you know from Docker run with a new qsub parameter called -xd (to select ports or devices for example).

Univa Grid Engine is a proven and a highly scalable (thousands of compute nodes) solution not just for traditional compute jobs, now also for Docker containers, which comes with enterprise features like accounting, reporting, access control, fair usage of compute resources through a set of policies which controls job priorities, simplification of administration and job submission through job classes, APIs, and quotas on container usage.