Grid MP is a commercial

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

software package developed and sold by

Univa Univa was a software company that developed workload management and cloud management products for compute-intensive applications in the data center and across public, private, and hybrid clouds, before being acquired by Altair Engineering in Septe ...

(formerly known as

United Devices United Devices, Inc. was a privately held, commercial volunteer computing company that focused on the use of grid computing to manage high-performance computing systems and enterprise cluster management. Its products and services allowed users ...

), a privately held company based primarily in

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city ...

. It was formerly known as the MetaProcessor prior to the release of version 4.0, however the letters ''MP'' in ''Grid MP'' do not officially stand for anything.

Product features

Grid MP provides

job scheduling A job scheduler is a computer application for controlling unattended background program execution of jobs. This is commonly called batch scheduling, as execution of non-interactive jobs is often called batch processing, though traditional ''job ...

with prioritization, user security restrictions, selective application exclusion, user-activity detection, and time-of-day execution controls. Grid MP can be used to manage computational ''Devices'' consisting of corporate desktop PCs, departmental servers, or dedicated cluster nodes. Computational ''Devices'' can be arranged into ''Device Groups'' for organizational, security, and administrative control. Grid MP has been demonstrated as being capable of managing grids of large numbers of nodes during its use in the infrastructure of the

grid.org grid.org was a website and online community established in 2001 for cluster computing and grid computing software users. For six years it operated several different volunteer computing projects that allowed members to donate their spare computer ...

and

World Community Grid World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and addin ...

projects (the World Community Grid project migrated to the open-source

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced – rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it beca ...

software in 2007 ). Despite its ability to "scale seamlessly to hundreds of thousands of device nodes" it is also suitable for smaller clusters of enterprise servers or workstations.

MGSI

MP Grid Services Interface, or simply MGSI, offers a web service

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

(via

SOAP Soap is a salt of a fatty acid used in a variety of cleansing and lubricating products. In a domestic setting, soaps are surfactants usually used for washing, bathing, and other types of housekeeping. In industrial settings, soaps are use ...

and

XML-RPC XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill. (June 2001) ''Programming Web Services with XML-RPC.'' O'Reilly. First Edit ...

protocols over

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

). It enables developers of back-end ''application services'' to access and manipulate objects within the system. Access to the API and all objects is access controlled and security restricted on a per-object basis. Since MGSI is a web service protocol, any programming language that has a

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

available can be used to interface with it, although commonly

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

, and

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

are used.

Management Console

A web-based MP Management Console, or simply MPMC, provides administrators with a simplified and easy-to-use interface to monitor system activity, control security settings, and manage system objects. The MPMC is written in the

programming language, and uses the MGSI web service for all of its interactions with the system.

MP Agent

The MP Agent (known as the ''UD Agent'' in versions before 4.0) is the

software agent In computer science, a software agent or software AI is a computer program that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency, which derives from the Latin ''agere'' (to do): an agreement to act on one's behalf. Such "action on beha ...

that must be installed on each computer that will participate in a Grid MP installation by running jobs. Once the MP Agent is installed on a computer, it is officially recognized by the Grid MP as a ''Device''. As of Grid MP Enterprise version 5.5, the MP Agent is supported on the following platforms: * Microsoft Windows on

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

IA-64 IA-64 (Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented by Intel in col ...

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...

* Solaris on

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *An Alternate Index, for a Virtual Storage Access Method Key Sequenced Data Set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belgi ...

on PowerPC *

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

on PowerPC and

* HP-UX on

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Grid Mp Grid computing products Job scheduling Parallel computing Computer-related introductions in 2001