Sun N1 Grid Engine 6

N1 Grid Engine 6 is part of the N1 Grid System. N1 Grid is Sun's vision, architecture, products, and services for optimizing network computing. The N1 Grid System provides all the core services for establishing, partitioning, provisioning, and managing grids.

N1 Grid Engine 6 delivers core grid capability in the N1 Grid System, providing policy-based workload management and dynamic provisioning of application workload. It can be used individually or together with other N1 Grid System products.

N1 Grid Engine 6 software creates a grid of network-connected servers, workstations, and desktops; provides user access to the grid; and provides administrative and management interfaces. Computing tasks or jobs are distributed across the grid in accordance with resource requirements for the job, user requests for the job, and administrative/managerial policies. Usage accounting data is stored and made available so that it is possible to determine what resources were used in the execution of a job and for whom the job was run. N1 Grid Engine 6 administrative overhead for the grid is low, so depending upon the optimization of resources to workload, overall resource utilization in an N1 Grid Engine 6 grid can approach 100%.

N1 Grid Engine 6 is used in enterprises to create grids at both a department level and at a multidepartment or enterprise level. Through the pooling of departmental resources into larger enterprise grids, multiple users, teams, and departments can share common resources while working on different projects with different goals and schedules, providing maximum resource availability to all users in a flexible, policy-based environment. Productivity can be dramatically increased compared to pre-grid approaches. Financial customers, such as TradingLab, are able to run a 10-hour risk portfolio analysis in 10 minutes. Mentor Graphics, an electronic design automation software supplier, can run an application that previously took 13 hours on a workstation in 45 minutes.