United Devices announced a definitive agreement to acquire Paris-based GridXpert, a meta-scheduling solution provider.

The acquisition establishes United Devices as a premium Grid solution provider in two of the top three High Performance Computing (HPC) segments — life sciences and manufacturing/design. GridXpert currently leads the manufacturing industry in providing enterprise Grid middleware and meta-scheduling solutions. In addition to market and technology expansion, the acquisition provides a base for expanding the company's European operations.

“United Devices is focused on serving Global 2000 companies that are embracing Grid technology as a strategic platform. Robust HPC management tools such as meta-scheduling and capacity management are needed to enable enterprise-wide expansions and to offer Grid as a service from central IT organizations,” said Ben Rouse, CEO of United Devices. “GridXpert offers the industry's leading meta-scheduling solution and largest collection of reference customer installations in this area. No other Grid or HPC vendor provides the quality and range of enterprise-level infrastructure management tools that our combined company will offer.”

“GridXpert is excited about joining forces with United Devices,” said Sven Lung, CEO of GridXpert. “The combined entity will offer the industry's most mature and scalable Grid solutions via its technology portfolio, domain expertise, product development capacity, and global reach. The result is more value for our customers and prospects.”

GX Synergy is a robust, platform-independent package that offers virtualized control of the entire HPC infrastructure. With GX Synergy, organizations can manage job scheduling across heterogeneous, widely distributed enterprise resources — including clusters operated by third party resource managers, dedicated servers and non-dedicated desktop resources.

“Our GridXpert solution has been critical in implementing a Grid to offer our clients a flexible, on-demand environment for running simulations. They can make use of the infrastructure when they need it and only get charged for what they use,” said Alain Roumiguier, sales manager at CETIM. “We are looking forward to the additional value that United Devices will provide with its broad pool of resources, technical expertise, and track record of customer satisfaction.”

United Devices will integrate the GX Synergy meta-scheduling capability into its HPC infrastructure management suite, which will strengthen its vender neutral, heterogeneous position via enhanced support for clusters, distributed resource managers and dedicated servers. United Devices will also Grid-enable the most popular HPC applications in manufacturing/design to quickly enable its new vertical focus and customer base.

United Devices will maintain GridXpert's Paris office as its European headquarters.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.