BioTeam's Mac OSX Work-Around for Sun's Grid Engine

By Matthew Dublin

The folks at BioTeam have developed a workaround for Mac users who want to employ The Grid Engine (SGE) on their HPC clusters. Grid Engine 6x. is apparently not installable on recent Mac client and server OSX versions, including Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard). According to Chris Dagdigian at BioTeam, the basic problem is that "SGE binaries will not launch or will be unreliable when started by ANY METHOD other than the system level OS X 'launched' service framework...and since neither the SGE installation scripts nor 'traditional' SystemStarter scripts that SGE install on Mac OS X systems use launched framework this basically means that SGE 6.2 is unusable out of the box without manual intervention and custom starter scripts.." Click here for a step-by-step manual workaround, but be warned, if you are new to SGE, this may seem a bit tricky.

Here's a screencast of the workaround on an Apple Mac Mini running Mac OSX 10.5.8 Server by Dagdigian: