Sun Grid Engine: towards creating a compute power grid

This paper provides an up-to-date overview of the Sun Grid Engine distributed resource management software and of future plans to enhance it towards and integrate it into computational grid environments. The main scope of many of today's Grid research projects is to understand and demonstrate the actual potential of networking, computing and software infrastructure for computational Grids and to build proof-of-concept middleware. This has resulted in Internet infrastructure projects like Globus (Foster and Kesselman, 1997), Legion (Chapin et al., 1999), and Punch (Kapadia and Fortes, 1999) which enable users to combine a set of distributed resources into one integrated Grid Workbench to allow users to measure nature (e.g, with microscope, telescope or particle accelerator), process the measured data according to fundamental mathematical equations (e.g. the Navier-Stokes or Maxwell equations), and provide computer simulations and animations to study and understand these complex phenomena.