Overview

The PDriver, or Parametric Job Driver, can execute command-line programs as a parallel processing service using the GridServer environment. This driver enables you to run a single program on several Engines and return the results to a central location, without writing a program in Java, C++, or .NET.

PDriver achieves parallelism by running the same program on Engines several times with different parameters. A script defines how these parameters change. For example, a distributed search mechanism using the grep command can search a network-attached file system, giving each task in the Service a different directory or piece of the file system to search. Scripts can iteratively change the value of variables that are passed to successive tasks as parameters, step through a range of numbers, and use each value as a parameter for each task that is created, or define variables containing lists of parameters.

PDriver uses its scripting language, called PDS, to define Services. You can also use these scripts to set options for a PDriver Service, such as remote logging and exit-code checking.