Gridware Cluster Scheduler

Advanced Workload Management Made Easy

Your Choice

The Gridware Cluster Scheduler (GCS) is a powerful workload management and job scheduling system, based on the freely available Open Cluster Scheduler (OCS) hosted on GitHub. OCS itself originates from the Univa Open Core Grid Engine, which in turn was derived from the open-source Sun Grid Engine. 

The Gridware Cluster Scheduler extends OCS by offering additional commercial features and professional support options:

Gridware Cluster Scheduler

Open Cluster Scheduler

FAQs

Our product, the Gridware Cluster Scheduler, is a workload management system that optimizes the distribution and execution of tasks and jobs across computing resources such as servers, clusters or cloud instances. The primary goal is to ensure that resources are used efficiently while meeting various requirements such as priorities, performance targets and resource constraints.

Key features include:
  • Job scheduling: Assign tasks or jobs to available resources based on pre-defined criteria such as priority, resource availability and dependencies.
  • Resource Allocation: Manage the allocation of computing resources (CPU, memory, storage, software licenses, …) to tasks based on their requirements and the overall system capacity.
  • Load balancing: Distribute tasks evenly across available resources to avoid overloading any particular resource and ensure optimal performance.
  • Monitoring and reporting: Collect and analyze data on resource usage, job completion times and system performance to identify bottlenecks, predict future resource requirements and optimize resource allocation.
  • Priority Management: Supports different levels of task priority to ensure that critical jobs are completed promptly, while less important jobs can be delayed or deprioritised during peak periods.
  • Fault Tolerance: Implementing failure handling mechanisms such as job retries, automatic failover and rescheduling to maintain system reliability and availability.
  • Scalability: The ability to dynamically scale the system to accommodate changing workloads and resource requirements, such as adding or removing servers or adjusting resource allocations based on demand.

In terms of compatibility, the Gridware Cluster Scheduler is a replacement for:

  • Sun Grid Engine (from Sun Microsystems).
  • Oracle Grid Engine (from Oracle).
  • Univa Grid Engine (from Univa).
  • Open Grid Scheduler (Open Source).
  • Son of Grid Engine (Open Source).
  • Other products on the market based on the same source code 

Unlike other Grid Engine variants, Open Cluster Scheduler and Gridware Cluster scheduler offer a clear and committed roadmap.

Gridware Cluster Scheduler is adopted for its exceptional stability, scalability, speed, and cost-effectiveness. Its comprehensive feature set incorporates solutions developed and refined over more than 20 years to address a wide variety of use cases. Due to its backward compatibility with SGE, it integrates seamlessly with numerous application stacks, including all MPI variants.

The source code on which the Gridware Cluster Scheduler is based has a history of more than 25 years. Read more about it in our first blog post.

The next release of Gridware Cluster Scheduler will be v9.0.8. 

We will regularly talk about upcoming features/enhancements in our blog posts. Read more about GCS v9.0.0.

Operating Systems:

  • Linux distributions (x86-64): SLES 15 (all service packs), openSUSE Leap 15, Ubuntu 20.04/22.04/24.04, RHEL 8/9, CentOS 7/8/9, Rocky Linux 8/9, Alma Linux 8/9  
  • Linux distributions (ARM64): Ubuntu 24.04, RHEL 8, CentOS 8, Rocky Linux 8/9, Raspbian 11/12
  • Additional architectures: Limited support for ppc64le, s390x, and RISC-V64 on select distributions

Limited Support:

  • Various other Linux distributions and BSD variants are available but may not be covered under standard support contracts- speak with us
  • macOS 14 (ARM64) – Admin/Submit clients only (currently in beta)

Note: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP7 is specifically certified by SUSE, and we support all SLES 15 service packs.

For the complete compatibility matrix including all supported components (Master/Shadow Service, Execution Service, Admin/Submit Clients) and detailed version information, please refer to the full release notes available on our download page.