UNITED DEVICES

'United Devices, Inc.' is a privately held, commercial distributed computing company that focuses on the use of grid computing to manage HPC infrastructures and enterprise cluster management. Its products and services allow users to "allocate workloads to computers and devices throughout enterprises, aggregating computing power that would normally go unused."

Contents

History

Commercial products

Public philanthropy

See also

References

External links

History

Founded in 1999 in Austin, Texas, United Devices began with distributed computing expertise from distributed.net^[2] and SETI@home, although only a few of the original technical staff from those organization are still on board today.
In April 2001, grid.org was formally launched as a philanthropic non-profit website to demonstrate the benefits of Internet-based large scale grid computing.^[3]
Later in 2002 with help from UD, NTT Data launched a similar Internet-based Cell Computing project targeting Japanese users.^[2][5] In 2004, IBM and United Devices worked together to start the World Community Grid project as another demonstration of Internet-based grid computing.^[2]
In August 2005, United Devices acquired the Paris-based GridXpert company and added ''Synergy'' to its product lineup.^[7]
In 2006, the company acknowledged seeing an industry shift of only using grid computing for compute-intensive applications towards data center automation^[8] and business application optimization.^[9][10]
Partly in response to the market shifts and reorganization, grid.org was shutdown on April 27, 2007 after completing its mission to "demonstrate the viability and benefits of large-scale Internet-based grid computing".^[11][12]

Commercial products

Main articles: Grid MP


★ 'Grid MP' — a job scheduler and application provisioning platform. It is offered in various editions, depending on the scalability needs of the customer. The company publishes a list of high-profile organizations using ''Grid MP'' on the United Devices website.

★ 'MP Insight' — allows customers to perform data analysis to determine if their grid computing resources are being effectively used.^[13]

★ 'MP Synergy' — a metascheduler based on Globus Toolkit technology that allows users to perform efficient scheduling within an organization that has multiple job schedulers already deployed and controlling independent clusters.^[14] Supported schedulers include Grid MP, Sun GridEngine, Platform LSF, PBS, LoadLeveler, and Condor.

★ 'Reliance' — designed specifically for the datacenter to provide automated infrastructure management and to ensure application service levels are honored by monitoring events and performing provisioning actions based on these events.^[15]

Public philanthropy

Main articles: grid.org

From 2001 until 2007, United Devices operated a series of public projects on their grid.org website as part of a philanthropic effort. It also acted as a marketing tool, helping to spread awareness of the Grid MP product ang demonstrating the platform's scalability. Some of the costs associated with operating the past projects on grid.org have been financially sponsored in part by companies including Microsoft, Intel, and IBM.
On April 27, 2007, United Devices closed down grid.org and the Cancer Research Project with the announcement that it "has completed its mission to demonstrate the viability and benefits of large-scale Internet-based grid computing."

See also

★ Distributed computing

★ Computational grid

★ CPU scavenging

★ Grid computing

★ Job schedulers

References

1. United Devices, Inc. Company Profile
2.
3. Screensaver aids cancer fight
4.
5. United Devices' Grid Experiment A Hit In Japan
6.
7. United Devices to buy French company
8. United Devices Gooses Grids
9. A Busy Week for United Devices
10. The Evolution of United Devices (and Grid, In General)
11. Grid.org "A Pioneering Internet Grid Project" is closing shop
12. Grid From the Bottom Up
13. United Devices Insight 4.0 Fuels Datacenter Automation
14. Grid Brokers and Metaschedulers Market Overview
15. Reliance: Enforcing Application-Based SLAs via Policies

External links

★ Official corporate website

★ Public distributed computing projects operated by United Devices

★ Corporate profile on WikiCompany