Global resource director (GRD) customer scenarios for large multiprocessor environments

Genias Global Resource Director (GRD) was developed to meet the demands of large multiprocessor sites with several 100s of CPUs and users. At the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and at BMW, GRD is installed on several types of Cray and SGI machines. This paper will describe how GRD integrates such resources into one environment automatically managed by global resource utilization policies. Benefits that the sites achieved in using GRD such as avoiding over-subscription of resources, automated management and utilization monitoring will also be discussed. In addition, an overview will be provided on the groundbreaking functionality of GRD which features a ticketing system based distribution of resource shares combined with online control of the CPU utilization of running jobs (also known as “dynamic scheduling”)