Once upon at time there was the free SGE from Sun. tricky to install and configure, but functional and free.
Now we've got:
- open source packages on Ubuntu that don't quite work out of the box (details on request).
- the actual source behind them, with a build process that depends on the c-shell and other obsolescences, available from two competing locations.
- a commercial packaging from Oracle
- a commercial package from Univa
What I am really wishing for is something with the basic capabilities of this that is simple to install and maintain. Heck, I'd take a front-end to hadoop that just queues and distributes simple shell-script-defined jobs.