From the beer gardens of Bavaria to the Sun of California or how Codine did become Grid EngineAmsterdam 05 March 2001 Until a year ago, Genias Software was developing and marketing the Codine resource management system for networked computers. As one of the very few European companies specializing in high-performance computing, it stayed independent until, after an intermediate merger with Chord Systems in San Jose, it became acquired by Sun. Codine became Sun Grid Engine and Genias Software CEO Wolfgang Gentzsch moved from Neutraubling in Bavaria to Menlo Park in California. We met him during the First Global Grid Forum conference in Amsterdam, where he explained the success the Grid Engine already has with over 5000 downloads in just six months, and the plans of Sun to not only incorporate Grid Engine into other Sun products like the HPC ClusterTools, but also contribute to the development of the Grid.
After a merger in 1999 that combined Genias Software with Chord Systems into a company called Gridware, the latter was acquired in July 200 by Sun.
For Sun, this was an opportunity to complement existing Sun software like the Solaris Resource Manager and the HPC ClusterTools, for example.
The main product of Gridware was Codine and the related GRD Global Resource Director. Codine is now renamed to Sun Grid Engine. "The whole Codine
development team stays located in Regensburg, Germany," said Wolfgang Gentzsch, "while the marketing and sales part has been
moved to Menlo Park, California.
Wolfgang Gentzsch, himself is now responsible for:
Sun Grid Engine, the good old Codine, manages compute nodes, distributed over a network. So it adds important functionality to current machine-oriented operating systems. Grid Engine provides, for instance, job distribution, load-balancing, dynamic scheduling, and policy based management. According to Gentzsch, "Sun considers software tools like the Grid Engine as an important part of Grid and Peer-to-Peer computing evironments, with the focus on compute and data intensive applications, like Globus, Legion, DataGrid, Punch or Cactus. Therefore, Grid Engine, is free on Solaris and Linux and will become open source mid 2001." "This is prerequisite for partners in the Grid community", he continued, "who currently develop open standards for Grid infrastructure tools and applications." As an example, Sun is looking into integrating Grid Engine into existing important scientific portals like Hotpage, the SDSC Entry portal for SDCS scientists to computing resources. On the other hand, Sun is already delivering Portal software like the iPlanet Portal Server. It is an environment that can deliver content, communication, and collaboration in the e-commerce Internet area. It is used by some of the very large web sites on the Internet, but could also be useful for smaller ones, probably in a scaled down version. Sun is leveraging Grid Engine with existing technologies like Grid portals, directory services, applications and web services, building an integrated platform combining content and computing.
"Sun joined the grid community in 2000", said Gentzsch, "because we saw that the Grid dramatically moved forward to its goal of providing access to and using computing resources over the Internet. Especially the Global Grid Forum performs highly valuable work in fields like:
Having moved from the beer gardens of Bavaria to sunny California, Gentzsch is eventually qualified to comment on the difference in approaches to the Grid in America and Europe. "Europeans have always been very good at generating good ideas and doing basic research," he notes, "while Amercians were much better at implementation and commercialization. For the development of the Grid, it is good that both groups are present in the Global Grid Forum" Gentzsch sees the future of the Grid mainly in dedicated Grid beds - well defined distributed environments with focus on special applications areas. These will be provided by Application Service Providers (ASP's), specilising in users environments like for instance enterprices, university, or government or dedicated towards applications like CFD, Crash Simulation, or Bioinformatics. ASP's will provide computing and data intensive services over Grids to the wall plugs of their end-users customers just like power and water supply today. (Well at least outside California they do ...)
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