Univa
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software, Cloud computing, High Performance Computing |
| Predecessor | United Devices (merged 2007) |
| Founded | 2004 |
| Founder | Carl Kesselman, Ian Foster, Steve Tuecke |
| Defunct | September 2020 |
| Fate | Acquired by Altair Engineering |
| Successor | Altair Engineering |
| Headquarters | Lisle , United States |
Area served | Global |
| Products | Univa Grid Engine, Navops Launch |
| Parent | Altair Engineering (from 2020) |
Univa was a software firm that focused on delivering workload and cloud management solutions tailored for compute-intensive applications spanning data centers as well as public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, prior to its acquisition by Altair Engineering in September 2020.
The company’s software aimed to maximize infrastructure utilization and throughput while keeping cloud costs under control by efficiently managing a variety of application workloads and resources.
Univa primarily targeted the High Performance Computing (HPC) sector, catering to industries including manufacturing, life sciences, energy, government research facilities, and academic institutions. Its solutions supported extensive HPC, analytics, and machine learning workloads within these fields.
Products and services
Univa was the developer and maintainer of Univa Grid Engine, its proprietary iteration of the popular Grid Engine workload management system. Additionally, it provided Navops Launch, a platform designed for cloud migration, automation, and expenditure oversight specifically for users of Univa Grid Engine.
In January 2011, Univa expanded its team by recruiting former developers from Oracle and Sun Microsystems who had worked on Grid Engine. By April that year, the company introduced the first commercial release of Univa Grid Engine, featuring improved performance and resource governance for clusters, supported by enterprise-grade assistance.
On October 22, 2013, Univa secured the intellectual property rights to Grid Engine from Oracle and took on customer support responsibilities for Oracle Grid Engine users.
May 2016 marked the launch of Navops, a dedicated business division concentrating on cloud migration and hybrid cloud deployment strategies. Navops Launch is compatible with leading public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
Navops Launch automates the management of Univa Grid Engine clusters in the cloud by dynamically adjusting resources based on workload demands and organizational policies. It also delivers comprehensive cloud cost management by gathering data via cloud APIs, allowing for detailed expense tracking at the project, team, or departmental level.
Univa consistently upgraded both Univa Grid Engine and Navops Launch to accommodate new operating systems, hardware architectures, and cloud platforms. Emphasizing scalability and performance, this was exemplified by a June 2018 deployment involving a one million core cluster on AWS. The company also prioritized handling containerized workloads as well as those requiring GPU support.
Comprehensive support, training, and consulting services were available to help clients with installation processes, system tuning, and product configuration.
History
Established in 2004 as Univa Corporation by Carl Kesselman, Ian Foster, and Steve Tuecke, the company initially concentrated on open source offerings and support centered around the Globus Toolkit.
On September 17, 2007, Univa merged with Austin-based United Devices, briefly operating under the name Univa UD before returning to the Univa Corporation brand. On January 17, 2011, it brought on board key engineers from the original Grid Engine development team.
The acquisition of intellectual property rights including copyrights and trademarks for Grid Engine technology from Oracle occurred on October 22, 2013. This transition included assuming support duties for Oracle Grid Engine customers.
In June 2014, Univa entered into a technical collaboration with the Sahara Force India Formula One Team.
The creation of Navops as a new business unit followed in May 2016, offering solutions built upon its Grid Engine workload scheduling technology. Navops Launch facilitates enterprise workload transitions to cloud or hybrid cloud infrastructures.
In March 2018, Univa made Navops Launch (previously known as Unicloud) open source under the Apache 2.0 license through Project Tortuga.
September 2019 saw the introduction of Navops Launch 2.0 featuring an upgraded user interface along with enhanced automation and cost management functionalities.
Eventually in September 2020, Altair Engineering—a global technology company specializing in data analytics, product innovation, and high-performance computing (HPC)—acquired Univa.
See also
- Computational grid
- grid.org
- Job schedulers
- High-performance computing
- Supercomputing
- Big data
- Distributed computing
- Grid computing
- CPU scavenging
- Cloud computing
References
- Articles with short description
- 2020 mergers and acquisitions
- Supercomputers
- Cloud computing providers
- Job scheduling
- Defunct software companies of the United States
- Companies based in DuPage County, Illinois
- Software companies established in 2004
- Software companies disestablished in 2020
- Lisle, Illinois
- Grid computing