In this mailing list post from early December, Dan brings news of some interesting changes planned for how Grid Engine is going to handle interactive jobs starting with the SGE 6.2 release planned for mid-2008:

“In 6.2, coming middle of next calendar year, the mechanism for launching interactive jobs has been rewritten. With 6.1 and previous, an interactive job is started by submitting an rshd as a job and then forking an rsh to connect to it. (Or rlogin or telnet or ssh.) With 6.2, starting an interactive job means that the shepherd will fork a shell with a PTY and connect back to the qrsh client, no rsh/rshd involved. (With Grid Engine, the slave tasks for a parallel job are started via the interactive job mechanism.)

There are several important benefits to the new mechanism. First, no more rlogin port limits. Second, SGE certificate-based security will actually encrypt the communication streams of interactive jobs. Third, no more worries about whether your rlogin/rsh/ssh binaries are “tightly integrated” with Grid Engine. Fourth, you actually get a PTY… ”

This is a very new direction for qrsh based job and parallel task launching and I’m guessing it will be very enthusiastically received by the community as it greatly simplifies setup and administration. Dealing with rsh and SSH integration issues has always been a challenge.

A follow-up post asked about how this new mechanism will affect users of Kerberos and AFS which require token passing between machines as a way of securely handling distributed authentication and authorization. As someone who has personally discovered for the first time the joys of single-sign-on between Linux and Apple Mac OS X systems via Kerberos tokens and keytabs I’ll be interested in seeing how this plays out.