sawyl | Loadleveler goes open source

Interestingly, Big Blue are planning to open source Loadleveler:

IBM plans to open source applications like LoadLeveler and its high performance math libraries. Detailed plans are expected this summer, but Schultz did reveal that the software repository will be managed by the University of Illinois. Said Shultz: "IBM really feels there is a lot of value in this software, and opening up the IP will benefit the community much more than keeping it closed and putting out twice yearly releases."

This is excellent news. It's one of the significant weaknesses proprietary batch systems that they generally make it difficult to configure submit only hosts or small scale servers, either because of operating system support problems or prohibitive licencing costs. But if the tools are open source and freely available, then it becomes possible to create a distributed LL or TORQUE submission network — something makes life a whole lot easier for the interface crowd and bypasses the nagging security problem of transferring jobs and output to and from the compute resources — which has to be a good thing.