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PAUL KIRCHOFF DISCUSSES UNITED DEVICES, GETS PERSONAL

GRIDtoday recently talked to United Devices' Paul Kirchoff, vice president of marketing and business development, about his company and its announcements at Gt'04. Kirchoff also discussed his personal concerns about Grid in the enterprise, and his novel -- a thriller based in the world of Grid computing.

GRIDtoday: Tell us what United Devices is.

Paul Kirchoff: UD has been a true pioneer in the Grid computing space by building the software that interconnects and manages compute resources across a network. The roots of the company go deep in the distributing computing world with early technical talent hailing from the originators of SETI@home and Distributed.net. The company has Fortune 100 customers building out massive Grids consisting of tens of thousands of PCs, multiple clusters and data center servers -- all interconnected with UD's software. The company also operates a Processing on Demand Service and the world's largest general purpose computing resource (via www.Grid.org) with over 2.5 million devices powered by UD's technology.

Gt: So what exactly do you do?

PK: What United Devices does: United Devices provides Grid computing software and services. Our solutions enable any organization to coordinate and share existing resources across departmental and geographically dispersed organizations; the end result is a compute resource that increases in power over time and never depreciates in value. Companies looking to increase their compute capacity without investing in new hardware -- or companies who want to maximize the capacity or utilization of hardware purchases (clusters, servers, desktops) they've just made -- use our software to make this happen.

What Paul Kirchoff does: I am the vice president of marketing and business development. I'm responsible for our market and product direction and involving key partners in facilitating value for our clients.

Gt: What is United Devices showcasing at Gt'04?

PK: We've recently expanded our enterprise offerings to provide greater capability deeper into the enterprise computing infrastructure. Attendees can see our technology in action in three different areas at the show. During Intel's keynote speech, a high performance computing specialist from Chrysler will show the application LS-DYNA running simulations on a PC Grid using our Grid MP Workstation product. We'll also be showcasing our new cluster product, Grid MP Cluster, in IBM's booth. Their blade cluster will use some unique features in our product to wirelessly leverage other Linux and Windows compute resources in United Device's booth -- a wireless, Grid-ready, high performance computing cluster. Among the applications running here will be ABAQUS for FEA, NONMEM for PK/PD modeling and GOLD for VHTS. Finally, attendees can visit us in the United Devices booth (811) to see the extended nodes running these applications from the IBM cluster.

Gt: Tell us more about the concept of Grid Ready clusters.

PK: Grid Ready is the ability to run and manage a dedicated cluster but also to have the ability to expand that cluster securely and unobtrusively to any other dedicated or non-dedicated compute resource anywhere and at anytime. Everything is managed through the cluster as if were one machine. This represents a huge achievement in cluster management -- finally a commercial alternative that's both affordable and robust.

Gt: Can you provide some examples of use cases?

PK: Sure. Existing customers are using their Linux clusters with many satellite nodes connected for extra computational horsepower -- the Grid schedules job to the most appropriate resource. Those apps using MPI or PVM remain on the cluster and those that are loosely coupled are sent out to all available resources. More expensive architecture is freed up to handle specific jobs. In life sciences, for example, molecular modeling apps may remain on the cluster while virtual high throughput screening runs use both local and remote resources. In the petroleum field, a reservoir modeling job may remain on the cluster while a risk assessment model extends to all available resources.

Gt: What else are you announcing?

PK: We just announced a significant expansion of our enterprise offerings. We have a product called Grid MP Workstation to build windows-based Grids. Grid MP Cluster breathes new life into dedicated clusters by enabling them to expand to include other non-dedicated nodes. Grid MP Data Center can significantly accelerate server consolidation plans. Finally, we also announced a new, stand-alone data warehouse and business intelligence tool called MP Insight which is indispensable to Grid management, capacity planning and license fee management to name a few.

Gt: What are you seeing happen in the market today?

PK: We have customers who are pushing the commercial forefront of where the market is going and we are giving them technology and services to enable it. Not only do we have customers preparing to connect tens of thousands of nodes together using our software, but the benefits United Devices is bringing to customers extends outside of the traditional hard science areas. We are seeing great results accelerating statistical modeling, data warehousing processes, supply chain management and business intelligence applications for sales and marketing purposes.

Gt: Where is all of this headed?

PK: Grid technology stands to grow in sophistication, interconnectivity and efficiency as a whole. But we also believe that we are delivering today on the value proposition that many others label as "the future" in their slideware. For example, several United Devices customers have clusters and satellite nodes interconnecting across departments and geographies to other Grid-ready clusters, massive windows Grids, and data center environments. The system is managed and coordinated with our software and the underlying architecture is significantly heterogeneous.

With many of our customers expanding to tens of thousands of devices, the Grid is already becoming a standard and invisible IT service. However, the exciting part is the step-function that is happening in innovation, science and speed of decision-making as a result of this massive increase in computing capacity. After all, we're removing a key limitation on science/analysis -- the departmental computing budget and limited compute capacity. This progress will drive a shift in ISV business models -- software vendors must now prepare to take advantage of an environment that is less planned and more like an amoeba -- always changing. Pegging pricing to hardware value may not make sense any longer. Plans based on usage, where the entire library of apps is made available to each customer will become the norm.

Gt: What keeps you up at night?

PK: Grid computing is now completely aligned with the customer -- it delivers on the promises of lower cost, greater speed and broader scope. However, there is an entire ecosystem that evolves as the market moves from one HPC architecture to the next on the cost/performance curve. That evolution, in the markets we serve, is happening now -- and in the midst of many potential paths of value we have to remain disciplined to handle the growth one customer at a time.

Gt: Tell us something interesting about you, personally.

PK: Well, I may be the only Grid executive who's also published a corporate thriller novel about (among other things) in silico drug discovery and Grid computing. I wrote the book -- "Leapfrog" -- over the course of nearly eight years from business school through late 2003. Leapfrog is a story that takes place in the world of drug discovery. At the time I started the book my father was suffering from a rare and aggressive form of prostate cancer. Eight months later, he was gone. By the time I completed the final edits last year I'd decided to self-publish the novel and give all the profits to charity. To date, and with the help of the National Foundation for Cancer Research, I've raised nearly $20,000 to fight Cancer and Alzheimer's. You can read more about the book and the mission at www.kirchpandrews.com.