I'm trying to work out whether we should try out Condor or Sun Grid Engine at work (or possibly something else).
We often have lots of unused WinXp workstations. The hope is that we could use wake-on-LAN, run all our jobs, and then shut down automatically. We'd mainly be running Matlab, Java or Python simulations for either monte-carlo or parameter explorations.
With my limited knowledge of Condor, it sounds like using a the vm universe might be a convenient way of taking care of snapshots without having to modify existing code.
Is SGE or something else better than condor for this kind of work?
I'd start with Condor. It has good support for Windows, and newer versions have built-in support for sending wake-on-lan in a very configurable way when jobs can run on certain machines. It can also shut the machines down based on user-defined policies.