"In the past, companies have made isolated purchases of expensive high-performance resources, creating pockets of underutilized resources across the enterprise," said Ahmar Abbas, managing director at Grid Technology Partners. "United Devices' announcement is significant. They have extended their technology leadership in several areas and solved the balance problem of aggregating available power and preserving organizational control within the enterprise."

Key benefits of the Grid MP platform include a new paradigm in virtualization and control of resources, users, policies and applications within an enterprise - regardless of geographic or administrative boundaries. The new platform also supports MPI (Message Passing Interface), which increases the number of applications available to run on a device grid. These applications can be rapidly migrated and can typically be run 'as is' without any source code modifications.

Another new feature is the ability to run Linux-based applications on Microsoft Windows platform, matching significant available compute power to applications used in high performance computing.

"This next generation architecture raises the bar significantly for high-performance computing," said United Devices CEO Ed Hubbard. "We've listened to our customers and have delivered a platform that will take grid computing usability and functionality to the next level."

Grid MP will be deployed to United Devices' existing users, including the University of Texas' Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). "These new features bring the compute power we are looking for to enable us to run a greater set of scientific applications and solve more complex problems," said Director of TACC, Dr. Jay Boisseau. "We have been anticipating Grid MP's new additions to expand our deployment and migrate an even greater number of applications onto our internal grid."