Grid MP

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Grid MP

UD Agent for grid.org under Windows
Developer:	United Devices, Inc
Latest release:	5.1 / February 2006
OS:	Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX
Use:	distributed computing
License:	Proprietary
Website:	www.ud.com

Grid MP is a commercial distributed computing software package developed and sold by United Devices, a privately held company based primarily in Austin, Texas. 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.

1 Product Features
2 Product Editions
3 Release history
4 External links

[edit] Product Features

Grid MP provides job scheduling 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.

[edit] MGSI

MP Grid Services Interface, or simply MGSI, offers a programatic web service API (via SOAP and XML-RPC protocols over HTTP). 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 SOAP or XML-RPC library available can be used to interface with it, although commonly C++, Java, Perl, and PHP are used.

[edit] 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. Of technical interest is that the MPMC is written in the PHP programming language, and uses the MGSI web service for all of its interactions with the system.

[edit] MP Agent

The MP Agent (known as the UD Agent in versions before 4.0) is the software agent 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 5.1, the MP Agent is supported on the following platforms:

Microsoft Windows on x86
Linux on x86, IA-64, x86-64
Solaris on Sparc
AIX on PowerPC
Mac OS X on PowerPC
HP-UX on Itanium
additional platform support is in progress, based on customer interest.

[edit] Product Editions

There are several different editions of the Grid MP product available, depending on the number and types of computers that need to become part of the grid.

Grid MP Enterprise is available in several sub-editions:
- Grid MP Cluster—designed for managing Linux clusters.
- Grid MP Workstation—designed for managing a Windows desktop PCs.
- Grid MP Datacenter—designed for managing a diverse set of computational resources throughout the enterprise.
Grid MP Global—This is the highest-capacity edition of Grid MP and scales to handle hundreds of thousands of active computers. This edition is the basis of the grid.org and World Community Grid projects.

[edit] Release history

Release and version history

Date	Version (codename)	Description
in development	version 5.2 (beefalo)	?
February 2006	version 5.1 (brahman)	Support for Agent on HP-UX, support for version 10.2 of Oracle, improved server performance, automatic per-device error thresholds, custom Win32 Job Object UI restrictions
October 2005	version 5.0 (jersey)	Merge product codebases to bring features specific for Grid MP Global, such as Agent GUI, Program Graphics, Screensaver. Provide greatly expanded functionality in new "mpsub" command-line submission tool. Many performance, error reporting, and documentation improvements.
November 2004	version 4.2 (yuddom2)	provides Mac OS X Agent support, external authentication, and other features. Press release
May 2004	version 4.1 (yuddom)	provides AIX and Solaris, historical reporting, friendly installation. Press release. (There was also a follow up Service Pack 1 for this release.)
April 2003	version 4.0 (beefmaster)	major new object model, flexible security model, new scheduling controls, new management console. Press release (There was also a follow up Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 for this release.)
December 2002	version 3.2 (biocow5)	Job-level priority instead of Task-level priority. (There was also a follow up Service Pack 1 for this release.)
October 2002	version 3.1 (biocow4)	Oracle backend support.
July 2002	version 3.0 (biocow3)	Agent usability improvements, Agent resdata handling, SOAP interface, mpsub submission utility, garbage collector, many new SDK and application development features. This is the version still in use by grid.org and World Community Grid, as of June 2005. (There was also a follow up Service Pack 1 for this release.)
March 2002	version 2.2 (biocow2)	New service rate scheduling controls.
January 2002	version 2.1 (biocow)	XML-RPC interface, Agent GUI improvements.
October 2001	version 1.2 (longhorn)	provide distributed webload functionality.
April 2001	version 1.1 (think)	first publicly available release, used in the initial launch of the United Devices Cancer Research Project.
2001	version 1.0	Initial internal release.