Grid.org

Lisle, IL, July 21, 2008 — Univa UD, a pioneer in
HPC systems management products for the complete distributed computing
lifecycle today announced the launch of the Open HPC Management Interoperability Project on its open source community site, Grid.org. A
collaboration with Sun Microsystems, BioTeam Inc., Grid Gateway, and
Runtime Design Automation, the open source project's primary goal is to
simplify the challenges of managing HPC Systems and to reduce the
associated costs.

"Many interoperability initiatives have been designed to enable
applications to run out of the box, but there are several aspects of
HPC systems that have yet to standardize," said Gary Tyreman, vice
president and general manager of HPC for Univa UD. "These non-standard
aspects impact how effectively a system administrator integrates and
manages the system. With this project, Univa UD continues its
leadership by working with industry partners to drive standards
intended to remove business costs associated with vendor lock-in."

When HPC system elements, for example Distributed Resource
Management (DRM) systems, are not standardized, organizations
experience increased overhead and complexity in their HPC environments.
The results include reduced flexibility in migration and the
introduction of significant costs and barriers associated with
maintaining code and wrappers that are written around a DRM.

The Open HPC Management Interoperability Project (OHMI) is focused
on creating separation between job submission, operations management
and resource management environments by building a reference
implementation that unifies existing standards, best practice recipes
and migration tools. As a result, the OHMI project will enable HPC
management interoperability with minimal pain and expense by providing
a consistent management experience regardless of which DRM system is
being used. This creates flexibility and independence, allowing
organizations to reduce non-essential development and management costs
and to focus instead on solutions that solve important business
problems.

"Sun is a significant contributor and supporter of standardization,"
said Fritz Ferstl, Director of Grid and High Performance Computing
engineering at Sun Microsystems. "This project, with increased industry
support, will result in a great improvement in our customers' ease of
implementing and managing their cluster environments."

"The most pressing issue for implementations of HPC today is the
need to moderate operating expenses without sacrificing capacity and
growth," Gartner Inc. Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Carl
Claunch said.

Univa UD's Tyreman further states that, "Managers seeking to
increase the effectiveness of HPC environments will benefit from
solutions like OHMI that significantly reduce the amount of customized
systems integration work."

The Open HPC Management Interoperability Project is open to all
organizations interested in participating in the development and
standardization of basic HPC components and the codification of best
practices into a repeatable and predictable product. The Project will
be maintained on Grid.org (www.grid.org),
the online community for open source cluster and grid software users,
administrators and developers. The mission of the site is to provide a
single location where open source cluster and grid information can be
aggregated so that individuals with a similar range of interests can
easily exchange information, experiences and ideas related to the
complete open source cluster software stack.

Information about participation is available at www.grid.org.
Initial participants include BioTeam Inc., Grid Gateway, Sun, Runtime
Design Automation and Univa UD. Technology developed under this
agreement will be publicly available and will be incorporated into
Univa UD's UniCluster family.

About Grid.org

Grid.org is an open source community where cluster and grid users,
developers, and administrators come to connect and communicate,
exchange information and ideas, and participate in development
projects. Home to the UniCluster open source project as well as other
open source projects and communities, the Grid.org mission is to
provide an all-inclusive destination for people with similar cluster
and grid interests. For more information, go to www.grid.org.

About Univa UD

Univa UD is the leading provider of HPC systems management and data
center automation software. Univa UD products simplify the complex
nature of deploying and operating HPC and data center virtualization
environments, saving customers time and resources while giving them
confidence that their solution will perform as expected. Hundreds of
market-leading companies come to Univa UD to build and operate their
production infrastructures, from workgroup clusters to enterprise grids
to dynamic data center application provisioning. With a focus on making
business easier for our customers, Univa UD is advancing the vision and
practice of HPC and data center virtualization. Visit us at www.univaud.com.