New development for GridSAM

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GridSAM, the computational job scheduler funded by OMII-UK, provides an interface to many commonly used distributed-resource-management systems, such as Condor, PBS, Sun GridEngine and Globus. It has made key inroads into providing access to computational resources. This success has stimulated requests for new functionality from the e-Research community.

Earlier in the year, OMII-UK funded two projects with leading GridSAM developers: one with Imperial College London and the other with the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) in Beijing. ICT have enhanced the capabilities of GridSAM for deployment within their own infrastructure. By leveraging existing development work, this important international collaborative effort has already satisfied many of the requests for new functionality.

OMII-UK has transformed the development of GridSAM from a single internal strand into a process of open-community development. The development is hosted on SourceForge, which enables a greater responsiveness to user requirements as they emerge, and provides an accepted mechanism to accept contributions from the wider community. Tim Parkinson, OMII-UK Operations Manager in Southampton, sees the GridSAM work as a major step towards enabling future uptake: ‘This initiative has made GridSAM a robust piece of software for production use within the e-Research community. We will be commencing product roll-out in partnership with the National Grid Service and key Campus Grid providers in 2009.’

Steve Crouch.

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