ACADEMIA

TORONTO, CANADA -- Platform Computing Inc., a leader in distributed computing software solutions, announced major enhancements to its Enterprise Grid computing solutions that boost utilization of enterprise IT resources to nearly 100 percent. With the release of new versions of its flagship LSF (Load Sharing Facility) and MultiCluster for inter-cluster sharing, Platform is delivering the industry's highest levels of scalability and performance to accelerate Enterprise Grid computing. With a new high performance, Grid-enabled architecture, LSF 5 and MultiCluster 5 are the foundation of Platform's Grid computing solutions, empowering enterprises to harness the untapped processing power of globally distributed, heterogeneous computing resources. In addition, to provide customers with fully-interoperable Enterprise Grid solutions, Platform announced that it will offer integration support for Sun Grid Engine, PBS and PBS Pro. "Businesses that operate on a global scale need global-class tools to aggregate, allocate and manage their computational resources," said Robert Batchelder, Research Director at Gartner. "Providing an enterprise wide view of those resources, while preserving the ability to target their use locally, is an absolute requirement for successfully deploying Grid technology." With Platform's Grid solutions, enterprises can boost scalability to over 100 clusters across multiple geographic locations, with over 500,000 jobs per cluster, and more than 200,000 CPUs across the enterprise, spanning desktops, servers, and supercomputers. Enhanced features include: * Global Resource Sharing: MultiCluster enables reliable and transparent sharing of compute resources across remote locations. A new Resource Leasing Model provides a single system image across all clusters so administrators can easily manage resource sharing policies across an Enterprise Grid. * Easy-to-use Web-based Interface: A customizable Web-based interface facilitates access to distributed computing resources from any location, via the Internet. Administrators can manage clusters and resources online, and users can submit, control and monitor workload. An open, SOAP-based XML interface facilitates the customization and integration of applications that enable online access to LSF 5. * Optimal Resource Utilization: Enhanced fairshare performance enables enterprises to achieve close to 100 percent resource utilization. The right resources are automatically allocated to the right set of users and projects for maximum efficiency. * Flexible Management of Complex Resource Usage Policies: Dynamically manages resources based on easy to administer workload policies. Network-centric queues support multiple policies, while new Resource Allocation Limits provide flexibility in defining resource utilization across the enterprise. LSF 5 controls the job mix and resource usage between groups, ensuring optimal resource utilization. * Supporting Critical Workload. With LSF 5, large scale, mission critical jobs are executed reliably and on time: Advance Reservation ensures that sets of hosts are exclusively dedicated to specific jobs; while Memory Reservation Enhancement ensures that sufficient resources allocated to optimize throughput of large, memory intensive jobs. * High Resource Availability and Fault Tolerance. LSF 5 ensures continuous resource management, even in the event of host failures and network instability. Fast and efficient scheduler fail-over ensures zero downtime, no loss of work, and always-on access to resources. Platform's end-to-end Grid software solutions support all major Linux, Macintosh, Unix and Windows platforms and are the only production-ready, proven solutions that address the complexities of commercial Grid computing -- including heterogeneity, standards, security, workload management, data management, scalability, real-time functionality, and manageability -- with the flexibility to integrate with other computer hardware and software technologies. "Over the past decade, Platform has demonstrated that distributed computing, and Grid computing as an extension, can produce tremendous business benefits. More and more commercial enterprises are adopting Grid computing to integrate their distributed and heterogeneous IT infrastructure and improve IT efficiency, bringing order to chaos," said Paul Hill, VP, Marketing, Platform. "As Grid computing evolves, we are confident that Platform's solutions will continue to establish new industry benchmarks, as we anticipate and respond to our diverse customer requirements." With more than 1,500 customers around the world, Platform's solutions are being used to build Enterprise Grid solutions with some of the world's most innovative enterprises, including the Monsanto Company, the U.S. Department of Defense, Texas Instruments, and the Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment (ENEA). For more information on recent initiatives please visit http://www.platform.com/grid. Platform's Enterprise Grid computing solutions include LSF for workload management, MultiCluster to power Enterprise Grid computing across multiple clusters, ActiveCluster for Windows desktop Grid computing, Parallel for managing parallel applications, JobScheduler for jobflow management, File Transfer Agent (FTA) for fast file transfer, reliability and security, and Analyzer to enable IT decision making. Platform also offers Platform Globus, the industry's first commercialized version of the Globus Toolkit(TM) and Global License Broker for global license sharing.