Univa's Tuecke, Venkat to Lead Session at Open Grid Forum

Participants Get First Look at Merged Company's Open Source Roadmap

SEATTLE, Washington, October 9, 2007 — Univa's Steve Tuecke and Jikku Venkat will unveil the newly merged company's blueprint for the world's first industrial strength open source cluster and grid product suite during the Open Grid Forum (OGF21) Oct. 16 at the Grand Hyatt Seattle.

Taking aim squarely at vendors who offer only costly, confusing and limiting proprietary grid and cluster products, Tuecke and Venkat will lead a discussion about key issues raised by customers opting for open source implementations.

"Increasingly, businesses are embracing open source software models in many areas, but until now there has been no complete, integrated open source stack for cluster and grid," says Tuecke, Univa's chief technology officer. "Given Univa's open-source pedigree and United Devices' commercially proven technology, we believe that gap can now be filled and expect the resulting merged solution set will drive many more cluster and grid operators to open source implementations. There is no longer any reason to tie up cluster and grid systems with costly and limiting proprietary software."

Univa and United Devices, pioneers and leaders in cluster and grid technology, announced the merger of the two companies last month, becoming Univa. At that time, the company promised it would outline an "open source industrial strength" product roadmap at the Open Grid Forum.

Based on a free, downloadable open source cluster management product, Univa has said its end-to-end High Performance Computing (HPC) open source product suite will also include a fully supported pro version with rich functionality and an enterprise-class grid solution growing out of UD's award-winning Grid MP™ technology.

"Our vision is to emulate and improve on the open source models of software companies who have gone before us," said Tuecke, "companies like Red Hat and SugarCRM."

Tuecke, along with Dr. Ian Foster and Dr. Carl Kesselman, founded Univa in 2004, as well as the Globus Project almost a decade earlier. They are known as the father's of grid computing for their pioneering efforts in developing open grid software and standards.

Prior to founding Univa, serving as its initial CEO and subsequently becoming its CTO, Tuecke was responsible for managing the architecture, design, and development of Globus software, as well as the Grid and Web Services standards that underlie it such as OGSA and WSRF.

In 2002, Tuecke received Technology Review magazine's TR100 award, which recognized him as one of the world's top 100 young innovators. In 2003, he was named (with Foster and Kesselman) by InfoWorld magazine as one of its "Top 10 Technology Innovators" of the year.

"There continues to be a tremendous growth in the cluster market in terms of revenues and number of units," said Venkat, a co-founder of United Devices in 1999. "The open source grid and HPC expertise from Univa and the commercial technology and experience from United Devices put Univa in a unique position to serve this market. End-to-end, we can now offer the world's best-of-breed open source technologies backed with commercially proven solutions and world-class services and support."

Univa's session at OGF21 will be 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 16, in the Portland Room at the Grand Hyatt Seattle. Univa said details of its new product roadmap also will be available at the company's exhibit during the conference.

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