Up to fivefold increase in performance and scalability for LSF Customers: Platform Computing today announced the release of LSF 7, the most powerful, intelligent, policy driven application workload manager for distributed computing environments. With LSF 7, Platform has significantly advanced workload management, accelerating application performance and scalability for multiple application types using Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO). A pioneer in high performance computing and the leader in distributed batch processing, Platform has enhanced LSF 7 to extend its leadership from scientific and high performance computing to enterprise-wide grid computing. This next generation of LSF contains new scalability and advanced management features for customers who rely on LSF for their research, development and design processes. LSF 7 has the ability to scale to over 500,000 concurrent jobs, while increasing the number of completed jobs per day to more than 10 million, a fivefold increase. Built on Platform EGO, LSF 7 enables IT Managers to allocate compute resources dynamically to accelerate application performance based on changing business priorities. LSF 7 also includes the Platform Management Console, a new web based GUI interface, which provides centralized monitoring and administration of grid resources. This provides IT administrators with critical information on cluster health, resource utilization and service levels along with reporting and data collection. "In an industry that moves as quickly as electronics design does, Cadence needs tools that deliver quickly and efficiently," said Steve MacQuiddy, Senior IT Manager, Cadence Design Systems. "As members of the LSF 7 beta program, we saw first hand that Platform has not taken its leadership in the market for granted and has delivered a product that has new features and functionality that we can employ in our day-to-day work immediately for a significant impact on our business." Platform LSF 7, with Platform EGO, enables IT departments to provide sophisticated, consistent and accurate Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to their users. A unique feature of LSF 7 is its ability to temporarily borrow compute resources from any department or group willing to lend them to the enterprise grid. This EGO-enabled feature of LSF 7 ensures that the loaned compute resources can be returned to resource owners immediately should they need to reclaim them on short notice. With this capability, resource owners will be much more willing to share their compute resources with the enterprise grid. This ability of LSF 7 to borrow and lend resources for peak loads has the potential to dramatically reduce the capital and operating expenditures of an enterprise. "LSF is mission critical for enterprises to distribute and manage workloads as they acquire more and more compute resources to meet business demands," said Songnian Zhou, CEO of Platform Computing. "With LSF 7, these compute resources can be more efficiently managed according to the individual companies' requirements. This enables our global enterprise customers of LSF to achieve a high level of resource utilization, thereby lowering the total cost of ownership." Platform LSF is the industry leading distributed batch workload manager, used by over 2000 customers world wide, including customers in Industrial Manufacturing, Government, Education, Telecommunications, Life Sciences, Oil and Gas, and Electronics. For information on Platform LSF please visit its Web site.