From BeSTGRID

[edit] About MDS

MDS is the Monitoring and Discovery Service, which allows Grid applications to determine where particular resources can be accessed, and monitors the status of Grid resources.

You can see the MDS entries for BeSTGRID resources on the ARCS WebMDS System

http://webmds.arcs.org.au/webmds/

MIP is used to define the properties of a cluster and the services it provides for submission to MDS.