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Another good site is Supercluster.org. It has good free software on it for download. Torque and Maui are pretty good pieces of software.

If your interested, put some kind of reply so that I can get in direct contact with you.

I use openpbs (patched out the wazoo) with maui as the scheduler. The scheduler that comes with pbs sucks. Bad.

PBS can do dependancies, and you can set up node properties for heterogenous environments.

I hate to say this, but buying faster and cheaper machines may help too. Sun/Solaris is slow. No flames intended, but its a fact. Fortunately your not using solaris 9 with its 30% decrease in TCP/IP performance vs 7. I'm not sure how robust 8 is, but 9 has too many "features" (read bugs) for my taste.

Maui also works with other resource managers. The maui people have also forked off OpenPBS to something that is "better", YMMV. Maui also has a text based interface called wiki that you can make your own resource manager.

The info in your problem description is kinda lacking, but there should be a reasonable solution to your problem.

A rendering job is submitted to PBS just like all the thousands of other high performance computing jobs that research computing processes on a typical day. It is scheduled with a normal scheduler (like Maui) and managed like a normal research job. And yes, it has a priority that can be bumped up or down.

The blending of resources between research and instruction is just one of the outcomes of the High Performance Classroom. The local paper wrote this: Powerful gifts make tough questions easier to answer. Most universities keep their Instruction and Research separated. We at Purdue don't do that.

David Moffett, AVP Research Computing, Purdue University

Since the article doesn't really have to do with grid computing. Here are some real Grid Computing links.

Globus Toolkit
LSF
openPBS
gridengine
OSCAR
ROCK MPP
maui

and last but not least: beowulf cluster
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I've got 62 Alpha machines, 2 Intel 32bit, and 3 Itaniums on the way plus my laptop and this is only a 3 day a week job.

You want me to compile what?

I have a hacked version of PBS, a stock version of Maui, and a number of scientific libraries/applications that are compiled from source. I think thats enough :)

• Condor - seems to be the best free as in beer scheduler, but it's not free as in speech.
  
• OpenPBS - This one is sort of Free, but it is being developed by a company that doesn't seem so sure it likes it that way. The code goes BSD after a couple of years, and they've been doing that for several years, yet they don't make the old (now BSD) versions available, and they make you register just to download.
• Sun GridEngine - Free, and it looks pretty sweet. I couldn't get it to work on Debian, but people on the mailing list said they were using it with Debian.
• Globus Toolkit - Not so sure about this one.
• Maui - Scheduler system for supercomputers
• OSCAR - Sweet project from IBM to put together all the best Free tools for clustering! They are using the Maui scheduler in their system.

What I would really like to see is a HOWTO that gives a good overview of scheduling and clustering. Everything I have found so far is not so good.