2011/10/11 Chi Chan <[email protected]>: > However, if you look at the growth rate of Platform before 2000, Platform > grew at least 50% per year. Of course > as companies are larger it is harder to grow, but another factor is that > there are more Platform LSF competitors, > like SGE, Torque/Maui, Condor, SLURM, etc, and they have similar > functionalities but are much cheaper.
It has been like that for a few years - nowadays people just switch from SGE to PBS, LSF to SGE, or to SLURM or Condor, etc... without worrying much about the features (or lack thereof) in any batch systems. A lot of the distinguishing features in LSF are not used by over 80% of the users. But people who need those features are willing to pay the expensive licensing cost! For example, Platform has integration for parallel environment for (almost) each supercomputer platform. So for instance, if you don't have SGI machines (which over 95% of the sites don't), then you won't need the SGI MPT integration. Another example, GPU integration. A lot of sites don't have CUDA or OpenCL applications. While Platform's GPU integration is still the best among all of the solutions provided by major batch systems (including the new one in Open Grid Scheduler), over 90% of the sites don't need it. And finally, Platform Analytics does reporting properly! I attended a business analyst workshop a few years ago, and after knowing how companies are handling their data for analysis, I immediately realized that the ARCo way was not efficient. While both ARCo & Platform Analytics store job & cluster information to a database, the way data is archived & processed makes a huge difference in load of the database, and the type of queries that can be easily issued by the cluster administrator. And I used to avoid mentioning this but as Platform will be owned by IBM it does not matter now - luckily, the work needed to fix ARCo is not extremely huge, in the end, Platform Analytics uses a 3rd party front-end, so ARCo can be re-architected to do very similar things relatively easily. Rayson _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] https://gridengine.org/mailman/listinfo/users
