The SEAS Grid system is a batch oriented computational resource, designed around the Sun Grid Engine scheduler. A Grid is a series of compute nodes, which are loosely coupled. As users place jobs into the grid scheduler, they are run in order along with any other jobs. The Grid has been designed to allow all SEAS students, faculty and researchers to run jobs without any additional administrative setup.
In order to allow for maximum flexibility going forward SEAS has implemented the ability for groups to add their own server farms. This allows groups to "buy in" nodes to the grid which become available to the entire structure. The groups are given a special run queue which allows them priority access to their own nodes. This win-win allows the groups to have their nodes professionally run by administrative staff, and allows the idle time that might be available to be passed on to other users.