PBS x SGE comparison?

[Chris Black]

> Alltogether, PBS might be more mature but SGE seemes easier to get
> into. I would like our students to be able to install batch system on
> their home computers for tests and learning (while also working on our
> cluster), so this means plus for SGE.
> 
> My result so far: Only PBS with MAUI and www GUI would probably beat SGE,
> but the 3-component instalation hassle might be too big.

We recently (within the past 6 months) moved from OpenPBS to SGE. Stability 
and robustness under high loads (10,000+ independant serial jobs) was our 
reason. OpenPBS just crashed occaisionally under this type of load (and 
queueing got a bit slow and wonky once 5000+ jobs were in the queue) and 
the advice that is given by the people who maintain PBS seems to always 
be to upgrade to the commercial PBS Pro version.

With SGE, you can setup what is called a 'job array', which is a
single qsub that tells the scheduler to run the same command with
arguments 1-n. This is far more efficient for the scheduler to handle
and we haven't had any more of the types of problems we had under PBS.

I am also quite a bit happier with the SGE team's responses to problems.
We had an odd problem with the output of qstat when there was a heavily 
fragmented job array in the queue. They fixed it quickly and sent us a 
new binary.

Chris

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