APPLICATIONS

Feature-rich Web Infrastructure Enables New Era of Grid Software as a Service (GSaaS): Parabon Computation, a veteran provider of grid computing solutions that enable high-performance computation on demand, today announced a new browser-based “dashboard” interface to its flagship software product, the Frontier Grid Platform. Available now, the Frontier Dashboard provides users a convenient and easy-to-use web environment for running, monitoring and managing massively parallel, grid-powered applications. Moreover, it provides developers with a full-featured application infrastructure – complete with single sign-on authentication, user account management and accounting/billing functions – that facilitates the creation of “grid software as a service” (GSaaS) applications and businesses. The Frontier Grid Platform revolutionizes high-performance computing (HPC) by virtualizing the computational capacity of many thousands of computers and delivering it in aggregate as a high-powered utility, just as electricity is delivered across a national power grid. Its unmatched security model and robust fault-tolerance allows Frontier to be safely deployed across the enterprise, within a cloud or data center as a virtualized appliance, or accessed online via the Parabon Computation Grid. Because Frontier draws its power by unobtrusively tapping the unused, otherwise wasted capacity of practically any computing resource, it delivers extreme-scale yet “green” computation at a small fraction of the cost of comparably powered hardware solutions and without the associated power/space/cooling issues that plague dedicated hardware deployments. Whether applied to modeling and simulation, optimization or other complex algorithms, the scalability and price-performance advantages made possible with Frontier enable users to accelerate the throughput of existing applications or perform groundbreaking calculations at a depth heretofore not considered possible. The new Frontier Dashboard provides a web portal from which users can select and launch grid-powered web applications, as well as monitor and manage all of their Frontier jobs, even those launched from more traditional desktop applications that employ Frontier. The Frontier Dashboard also eliminates the barriers that otherwise dissuade developers from developing grid applications or starting grid software as a service (GSaaS) businesses. Not only are HPC hardware costs avoided, but the customer management features that complicate the deployment of software as a service, grid software or otherwise, are handled entirely by the Frontier Dashboard – allowing developers to focus on their grid application and not the user infrastructure required to deploy it. “At Parabon, we remain committed to delivering high-performance computation on demand – transforming computation into a utility offering,” stated Steven Armentrout, Parabon President and CEO. “The Frontier Dashboard creates a new paradigm for the delivery of grid software as a service (GSaaS), one that gives government agencies, systems integrators and academicians significantly easier access, reduced costs and better control over high-performance computation. We are extremely pleased to continue our pioneering track record in the grid marketplace. With Parabon, our customers can step into a new paradigm of what is computationally possible.”