United Devices Expands Cluster Capabilities with HP-Certified Management Tools; Company Announces Certification On HP's XC Clusters; Integrates with Third-Party Management Tools To Provide Higher Level of Management

AUSTIN, Texas -- Oct. 4, 2005--United Devices(TM) today announced that its MP Synergy(TM) meta-scheduling solution is now certified on HP'S Linux-based XC clusters, raising the bar on productivity and price performance by enabling optimized cluster utilization across the enterprise.

United Devices' MP Synergy(TM) solution offers companies that operate multiple clusters the ability to schedule work across heterogeneous and geographically dispersed systems managed by third-party software tools. This provides competitive advantages to Linux cluster users, including significantly improved scope of processing and expanded work capability. With a Grid MP-enabled cluster environment, companies can improve productivity and create innovation while reducing IT costs by running more jobs more efficiently across the entire infrastructure.

"The benefits of MP Synergy-enabled XC Cluster are clear," said Jikku Venkat, United Devices chief technology officer. "With MP Synergy, these enterprises can now manage job scheduling across multiple clusters regardless of what system is being used to manage that cluster. The result is an increase in utilization with a reduction in overall application load."

The ability to manage a broad range of clusters from a single tool means companies can achieve more with their current applications. For example, pharmaceutical companies can increase the scope of screening work done to more rapidly and accurately identify good drug candidates. Auto manufacturers can harness more machines to process crash simulations with greater precision, enhancing the design of the finished product.

The United Devices solution for HP Cluster Platforms, including XC Clusters, makes it possible to schedule jobs from a single management tool. Users can directly submit work to the third-party system via the vendor's standard interfaces. Where multiple clusters are in operation, work can be scheduled and managed across the disparate systems to optimize utilization and processing time.

"MP Synergy-enablement of HP's XC clusters allows smooth integration of our powerful cluster systems into enterprises utilizing United Devices' Grid MP(TM) platform or a range of other resource managers to optimize the use of resources across diverse and distributed environments," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager, HP High Performance Computing group. "These enterprises can quickly expand their high performance capabilities with our XC Clusters and have a resource platform for their most difficult problems."

"The ability to schedule jobs across dedicated, disparate clusters using a single management tool is unprecedented," said Venkat. "This package delivers a price-performance ratio and level of enterprise manageability previously unavailable in the Linux cluster space. With a Grid MP-ready HP XC Cluster, customers can fully leverage their cluster investment and share resources without the need to purchase additional grid management packages."

An MP Synergy-enabled cluster can also backfill work from the existing scheduling tool to a special Grid MP platform agent, leveraging any cycles not already consumed by the primary system for expanded processing capability. Additionally, the Grid MP platform can act as the primary scheduler for the cluster and can extend the cluster's power to external resources. A Grid MP-enabled cluster can receive work from external systems or send overflow work out to other systems. Jobs can be targeted at individual clusters or split among several clusters, with submission options that range from simple command line utilities to more involved scripts that use the Grid MP Web services APIs.

United Devices grid and HPC management technology currently operate enterprise grids and clusters at many of the world's largest companies. The technology also powers two of the world's largest public grids.

About United Devices

United Devices is a market leader in high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure software and services. The company's Grid MP(TM) products optimize an organization's existing HPC resources (including clusters, servers and desktops) to create an enterprise-wide capacity on-demand environment. United Devices also operates the world's largest grid for grand-scale research that consists of more than three million systems in more than 191 countries and territories. For more on secure grid solutions: http://www.ud.com. To volunteer idle compute power: http://www.grid.org .

United Devices, Grid MP and Grid-Ready are trademarks of United Devices.