Thread: Difference between Symphony and Symphony DE

Symphony DE was designed to provide a dedicated and easy to manage system for developers to code, test, and tune their HPC applications that will ultimately be deployed onto a Symphony Grid cluster for commercial production. From building to testing, work can be performed on one development host. Users do not have to worry about deploying and managing a full-scale cluster environment.

From a features perspective:

1) Symphony DE includes additional developer oriented features:

• The Symphony SDK for building clients and services
• Sample applications for reference and a template to build on
• Step-by-step developer tutorials and other documents suitable for novice and experienced developers alike

2) Symphony DE does not include the Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO) resource management component used by Symphony. It does support basic resource distribution and host management through its own SOA Middleware. This allows developers to simulate a distributed environment on their own machines for testing clients and services without requiring a full Symphony cluster.



3) The web-based GUI management console is scaled down to exclude grid specific features such as reporting and advanced resource management. The DE management console provides developers with an interface to manage applications, monitor workload, and administer the test environment in a similar fashion to the full-scale grid version.

4) With fewer components to manage, the number of processes started by Symphony DE is much fewer. Startup and shutdown can be executed through the Symphony DE Control Panel.

Note that EGO allows multiple SOAM / LSF middleware to share compute resources. EGO supports failover of service daemons. Failure of a DE service daemon like RS/SD will bring down the cluster.

No consumers in SYM DE. A consumer allows the admin to segment resources within a cluster for each app.

No log retrieval, PERF, WSG, middleware deployment in Sym DE.

No SSL in DE.

Sym DE is faster to startup/shutdown service daemons.

Not much security in Sym DE. No EGO security plug-in.