Oracle Grid Engine
| Company type | Software |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software, Grid computing |
| Predecessor | Gridware |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Founder | Gridware |
| Fate | Acquired by Sun Microsystems, then Oracle Corporation, then Univa Corporation, now developed as Open Cluster Scheduler |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California; Regensburg, Germany , United States; Germany |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Unspecified principal engineers from original Sun Grid Engine team hired by Univa in 2011 |
| Products | Oracle Grid Engine, Sun Grid Engine, Univa Grid Engine, Open Cluster Scheduler, Gridware Cluster Scheduler |
| Owner | Altair Engineering (via acquisition of Univa in 2020) |
| Parent | Altair Engineering (since 2020) |
Oracle Grid Engine, initially recognized as Sun Grid Engine (SGE), CODINE (Computing in Distributed Networked Environments), or GRD (Global Resource Director), functions as a batch-queuing system designed for grid computing to oversee computer cluster operations. The software was first created by Gridware before being acquired and further developed by Sun Microsystems, and subsequently by Oracle Corporation. Over time, both open source and commercial editions have been released by Sun, Oracle, Univa Corporation, and HPC Gridware under the name Gridware Cluster Scheduler. The open source variant continues to evolve under the SISSL license as Open Cluster Scheduler.
On October 22, 2013, Univa secured ownership of the intellectual property rights and trademarks associated with Grid Engine, establishing itself as the exclusive commercial provider and advancing the platform—highlighted by orchestrating a 1 million-core cluster deployment on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2018.
Despite the original open-source Grid Engine project website shutting down in 2010, versions remain accessible under the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). Various forks such as Son of Grid Engine, Open Grid Scheduler, Univa Grid Engine, Open Cluster Scheduler, and Gridware Cluster Scheduler continue development.
Grid Engine is extensively utilized within high-performance computing (HPC) environments to schedule, dispatch, and manage extensive quantities of standalone, parallel, or interactive tasks. It optimizes allocation of distributed resources including CPUs, memory capacity, storage space, and software licenses.
A significant milestone for Grid Engine was its role as the core technology behind the Sun Grid utility computing service introduced in 2006 in the United States. This pioneering cloud computing platform preceded offerings like AWS and later expanded internationally.
History
In 2000, Sun Microsystems acquired Gridware, a company specializing in advanced resource management software for computing clusters with offices located in San Jose, California, and Regensburg, Germany. Later that year, Sun released a free version of Gridware compatible with Solaris and Linux operating systems under the new name Sun Grid Engine.
By 2001, Sun had published the source code and embraced an open source development approach. Community contributors also provided ports for Mac OS X and various *BSD platforms.
Following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2010, the source code for Grid Engine version 6.2 update 6 was omitted from binary releases, and modifications were not merged back into the public repository. This led to the community initiating the Open Grid Scheduler project to preserve a freely available implementation of Grid Engine.
On January 18, 2011, Univa hired principal engineers from the original Sun Grid Engine team to create a commercial fork known as Univa Grid Engine. This version competed directly with Oracle’s offering while providing professional support services.
Univa officially obtained all intellectual property rights and trademarks related to Grid Engine technology on October 22, 2013, becoming the exclusive commercial vendor and assuming responsibility for supporting Oracle’s existing customers.
In September 2020, Altair Engineering—a global firm specializing in data analytics, product innovation, and high-performance computing—acquired Univa.
By 2023, leading developers from Sun Grid Engine, Oracle Grid Engine, Univa Grid Engine, and their derivatives began work on the Gridware Cluster Scheduler (GCS), which is built upon the open source Open Cluster Scheduler framework and maintains full backward compatibility with SGE.
Cluster architecture
A standard Grid Engine cluster consists of a primary master node accompanied by several execution nodes. To ensure high availability, shadow masters can be set up as hot spares, ready to take over operations if the primary master node encounters a failure.
Support and training
Commercial support and training services for Univa Grid Engine and Oracle Grid Engine are provided by Univa. In the past, Sun offered support agreements for the commercial version of Grid Engine across most UNIX platforms as well as Windows. These professional services, including consulting, training, and technical support, were delivered through Sun Partners. Additionally, Sun partnered with Georgetown University to provide courses focused on Grid Engine administration, while The Bioteam conducted brief 1-2 day workshops dedicated to SGE training.
Community assistance was accessible through Grid Engine mailing lists. Furthermore, from 2002 to 2012, Grid Engine Workshops took place intermittently in Regensburg, Germany.
Other Grid Engine based products
Below is a list of historical products and solutions related to Grid Engine; some are no longer in circulation:
- Sun Constellation System
- Sun Visualization System
- Sun Compute Cluster
- ClusterVisionOS Distribution
- Rocks Cluster Distribution
- Univa's UniCluster Express
- Univa Grid Engine
- Some Grid Engine – an actively maintained free fork of SGE incorporating modifications, developed by Michigan Neuroscience Institute (2021)
- Son of Grid Engine – an inactive free fork featuring enhancements, created by University of Liverpool, and used as the default package in Ubuntu/CentOS/RHEL (2021)
- Open Cluster Scheduler – a currently active free fork derived from Univa Open Core Grid Engine and Sun Grid Engine (2025)
- BioTeam's iNquiry
- Nimbus – employs Grid Engine for virtual machine scheduling within cloud infrastructures
See also
- Sun Ops Center – datacenter automation software developed by Sun
- Open Grid Forum