Sun Turns Peer-To-Peer App Into Open-Source Software

In an effort to build momentum behind Grid Engine, Sun Microsystems last week opened up its binaries and turned the peer-to-peer application into open-source software, giving other companies the right to modify the code.

Sun obtained Grid Engine last year when it acquired Gridware. Since then, the free software has been downloaded at least 800,000 times, and Sun says the average Grid Engine user can share work across 50 servers.

Grid Engine can be used to balance workloads among servers scattered across long distances. Service providers can also use it to sell computing power under a utility pay-per-use pricing model, although Sun says the company has no plans to do that. Grid Engine resides on a network as a portal and accepts work from multiple places. It analyzes the work for urgency and complexity, and then sends it to an appropriate computer with available capacity.

Steven Gordon, deputy director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center in Columbus, Ohio, is preparing to use Grid Engine to provide computing resources to 88 colleges and universities throughout the state. "More and more, researchers have to know too much about computing to get their science done," Gordon says. "With the Grid Engine portal, they won't have to know a thing about the back-end system." The center expects to start sharing files statewide next month.

Kevin Wohlever, senior high-performance computing systems specialist at the center, is already using Grid Engine to move files between two small servers. One of the first to make use of the system is the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, which has a research project on pediatric disease genomics. "Maybe their machine doesn't have the capacity for a job, so they'll ship it to us over the Internet," Gordon says. "Then other schools send us smaller jobs, and we route them to the center's machine."

Grid Engine eventually will become a platform for utility computing, says Sarang Ghatpande, an analyst at research firm D.H. Brown Associates. In the meantime, the open-source decision has immediate benefits. "People could download Grid Engine before, but they couldn't modify it," Ghatpande says. "Now they can better integrate it with their existing applications and optimize it for their infrastructures."