gridengine.info

...in which Chris continues his habit of making incremental modifications to the work of people far smarter than him ...

There are two things I really like about Platform LSF product documentation that Grid Engine currently does not offer and I mentioned both at the 2007 SGE Workshop in Regensburg.

The first really cool thing that LSF does is create a custom HTML-formatted file after installation that combines a basic "how to administer your cluster" page with commands, links and paths that are specific to how the installation was performed on your local system. The path information is captured during install time and inserted into the custom "about your cluster" HTML page as one of the final installation steps. Very easy to do and incredibly useful. This is something that I may want to take a stab at contributing to SGE myself because the installation shell scripts are easier for me to get my head around than the C++ codebase that is Grid Engine itself. If you want to see an example for yourself, try a Google Search for "LSF + about_cluster" and see if anything comes up.

The second thing I really like about LSF's initial documentation are the excellent tri-fold brochure style "Quick Reference" PDFs that they provide with each update to their product. It is one of the better end user and administrator cheat sheets I've ever seen. I'd post a link to an example but I'm pretty sure that the PDF is only supposed to ship with the product. You can, however, do a Google Search for "LSF Quick Reference" and see what I'm talking about.

Because I do Grid Engine support for my employer I was able to justify some time spent hacking on DanT's "SGE Cheat Sheet" as well as a bit of borrowing from his Georgetown training slides in order make a first-draft version of a SGE specific tri-fold formatted PDF. Because I did this work on company time it's posted over at the corporate blog site.

Comments and feedback appreciated. Looking at the document I think it would be a good approach to split this into 2 documents -- one aimed at getting SGE Admins up to speed quickly and a second document crafted specifically for end-users who just want to use a SGE system. I may take a stab at a user specific version of this doc over the next few weeks.

Click on the graphic above to get to the PDF download link, or point your browser here:
http://blog.bioteam.net/2008/02/06/grid-engine-quick-reference-guide/