> 
> Hi, 
>  
> Do you use Sun Grid Engine ? How does it work ? I've checked your website but I 
> don't see any information about how SGE. 
>  
> > for linkage analysis. We are running an SGE-enabled version of 
> > SOLAR that manages all compute tasks. Currently the cluster is 
> > composed of MP Athlons and a few experimental Opteron boxes running 
> > solaris86. 

We use GridEngine on Solaris/Solaris86. The cluster is all running
Solaris86 right now. I had a local student working to port SGE to
NetBSD for me last year. Several people were apparently working on
it at the same time and it came together, but I've been too busy
to do much with a NetBSD cluster right now.

SGE is essentially integrated into the front-end of our software.
All of tour software can run without SGE. It just make things easier
to work iwth a cluster.  There is a custom version of SOLAR that
embeds the SGE control mechanisms to launch and manage the tasks
and we have many other scripts which use SGE to manage custom
operations. We haven't implemented any smp-type code. It's just
typical task-oriented code that we throw at a bunch of processors
at the same time. Much of what we do can be broken down for analysis
by marker, chromosome, trait, or individual etc. so it's easier to
arrange to have several hundred cpus each run one fairly linear
task at a time and report back when done.  Not terribly fancy, but
quite effective.

If you are interested, I can likely put you touch with a couple of
people who develop the SGE management facilities.