APPLICATIONS

TurboWorx, Inc. today unveiled its strategy to deliver a suite of solutions for companies in computationally intensive markets that rely on advanced, parallel and more recently, grid computing to solve technical computing problems. TurboWorx is addressing high-performance computing challenges by providing software that enables users to maximize productivity by creating, managing, and processing complex applications, workflows, and data in heterogeneous computing infrastructures. The delivery of this product suite marks the successful evolution of TurboWorx and the integration of technologies acquired from Argentys earlier this year," said Jeff Augen, president and CEO of TurboWorx. "With a history rich in life sciences, we are now extending value to companies in other industries that face similar high-performance computing challenges." Most engineering, scientific, and financial problems are comprised of a large number of related but discrete components that define a workflow. Today's technical computing environments are excellent platforms for distributing and processing such workflows because they are built using large numbers of individual machines that are each capable of processing individual components of a complex calculation. TurboWorx' new suite of products enables workflow sharing and collaboration, distributed resource management, and accelerated application execution. As a result, users can solve complex computing problems by building reusable workflows that will become valuable parts of their business infrastructures. Moreover, the flexible nature of TurboWorx' solutions facilitates an ongoing process of experimentation and improvement - attributes not normally present in previous computing environments that are built on more traditional scripts and queues. The TurboWorx product suite, built on the Company's open development environment, consists of TurboWorx Builder, TurboWorx Group, TurboWorx Enterprise, and TurboWorx ClusterManager. The Company's technology framework supports IBM AIX, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Unix, and Solaris. Because it is designed for heterogeneous infrastructures, the framework facilitates collaboration across multiple organizations, without the requirement that participants utilize the same operating system. -- TurboWorx Builder is a development environment in which components and workflows can be created, saved, tested, and imported/exported to other Builder environments. -- TurboWorx Group is a single-user distributed computing solution for running more demanding workflows. TurboWorx Group is limited to at most five worker machines, all of which must run the same operating system. Components and data are shared using the OS file system. -- TurboWorx Enterprise is the deployment of TurboWorx technology that allows users to run very complex and difficult workflows by distributing the computations across large heterogeneous computing environments. Multiple users can collaborate by sharing components and data using a Web Services framework. -- TurboWorx ClusterManager is a distributed resource management platform for Linux clusters that enhances application performance by improving resource scheduling and utilization. With a Web-based interface that includes sophisticated monitoring and reporting tools, ClusterManager enables users of the TurboWorx product suite to dynamically allocate and manage resources in response to changing business goals and objectives. "All businesses share a common problem - the need to process information quickly," said Augen. "Life sciences, energy exploration, manufacturing, financial services, and government research are just a few examples of data-intensive industries that have more information to process than they have computing and processing power available. Our solutions enhance the productivity of organizations in these industries without requiring additional investments in hardware or the complete restructuring of the computing infrastructure." Life and Material Sciences. Within the life and material sciences markets, in which TurboWorx has a strong history and an established customer base, the dramatic advances in information technology have enabled the use of in silico discovery. Researchers are now faced with solving complex scientific problems fueled by huge volumes of data. Computational workflows involving large numbers of discrete steps are the only suitable solutions to these problems. By making it possible for organizations to easily create reusable, automated, high-performance workflows, TurboWorx is enabling a new level of productivity. Energy Exploration and Production. Energy companies make daily decisions about the management of oil and gas reservoirs using suites of complex programs that predict future behavior under various operating conditions. The programs deal with data and mathematical models reflecting both scientific disciplines (such as geology, geophysics, petrophysics, chemistry, and reservoir engineering), and business issues related to regulatory and environmental constraints and economics. An immense amount of data and computation are required, which has led the industry to become one of the early adopters of parallel and distributed computing. TurboWorx application workflows are a natural tool for creating and deploying the program suites, since they make it easy to run the individual programs on different machines and to automatically route and convert the data between programs, all as part of a highly-manageable distributed computing process that incorporates all of the essential business logic. Manufacturing. The automotive and aerospace industries, among numerous others, routinely use "virtual prototyping" involving complex CAD, MCAE, and Finite Element applications in product design and development. Integrating these applications in a workflow from concept styling, to design, to analysis, to manufacturing, and looping back improves the end-to-end development process. By automating this type of iterative design workflow, TurboWorx enables engineering groups to minimize costly errors, speed development, and improve quality. Furthermore, workflow integration enables global design teams including suppliers to better collaborate around the clock on specific projects. Financial Services. Fixed income security pricing typically involves a complex set of operations that rivals the computational tasks underlying such purely technical pursuits as computational fluid dynamics, molecular modeling, and geological structure prediction. The calculations normally require simulating large numbers of scenarios that take into account past, present, and future financial environments. Moreover, analysts must predict the effects that different interest rate environments will have on a portfolio of investments - hundreds of securities must often be considered in each calculation. Such calculations almost always involve a large number of individual components, many of which have a distinctly parallel nature. TurboWorx solutions help users organize the individual components into a reusable workflow and take advantage of innate parallelism. This provides a performance advantage that translates into true business value for individuals who must respond quickly to a changing financial climate.