Product Overview

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

PDriver achieves parallelism by running the same program on Engines several times with different parameters. A script is used to define how these parameters change. For example, a distributed search mechanism using the grep command can conduct a brute-force search of a network-attached file system, with each task in the Service being given a different directory or piece of the file system to search.

One way PDriver scripts can achieve parallelism is to iteratively change the value of variables that are passed to successive tasks as parameters. A script can step through a range of numbers and use each value as a parameter for each task that is created. Or, a variable can be defined containing a list of parameters.

PDriver uses its scripting language, called PDS, to define how jobs occur. These scripts can also be used to set options for a PDriver Service, such as remote logging and exit code checking.