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TORONTO -- In response to the growing demand for proven grid computing solutions, Platform Computing Inc., the largest independent grid software provider, announced three global Acceleration Centers(TM) to help organizations prepare their applications and infrastructure for grid computing. Platform's grid computing solutions help organizations improve business performance by increasing service levels and optimizing IT infrastructure with software designed to plan, build, run, and manage grids. The Acceleration Centers are a key part of Platform's strategy to Accelerate Intelligence(TM), by providing industry-specific grid solutions to financial services, electronics and government customers around the world. Designed to help customers evaluate the business value of grid computing, the three Acceleration Centers will provide technical consulting, application integration and professional services, in partnership with key system vendors, application software vendors and professional services organizations. In the next few weeks, Platform will announce new OGSI-compliant products, key partnerships and application integrations, which will be offered through the Acceleration Centers. "Over the last decade, grid's business value in the technical computing markets such as electronics and government has been well established, and we are encouraged by the strong adoption of our grid computing solutions in the business community, such as financial services," said Songnian Zhou, CEO, Platform. "Our investment in these Acceleration Centers underscores our clear commitment to provide real, proven business solutions to these industries, accelerating intelligence in areas such as risk management, derivatives analysis, actuarial modeling, product design and military analytics." Financial Services Acceleration Center Mitigates Risk and Reduces Costs To facilitate grid computing's adoption in business computing, Platform has created a New York-based Financial Services Acceleration Center to serve its global clients. Working with key partners including IBM, Egenera, HP, Powerllel and Axiom, Platform will deliver integrated real-time and parallelized software solutions, including Linux and Windows-based solutions, to help financial services customers maintain service levels, reduce costs and mitigate risk. In addition to its strong financial services customer base including Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and RBC Financial Group, the company also announced three new customers: * Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg (LBBW), the biggest bank in southwest Germany, selected Platform LSF(R) to optimize its risk management applications; * Groupe Societe Generale, the third largest corporate and investment bank in the Euro zone, chose Platform Symphony(TM) in a competitive bid to support its virtual compute backbone to grid-enable online, interactive applications; * Capital One, one of the largest providers of MasterCard and Visa credit cards in the world, works with Platform Professional Services and uses Platform LSF to grid-enable key analytic applications to enhance its competitiveness and agility. LBBW, one of Germany's ten largest credit institutions and one of the top 50 banks worldwide, faced severe IT constraints as a result of needing to service three recently merged financial institutions. The capacity required for evaluating more than a million loans and securities accounts, ideally at the same time, was mind-boggling. "The banking and finance industry is predestined for grid computing solutions. Our business processes can be parallelized and thus made faster and more efficient than ever before," said Dr. Peter Oellers, head of risk technology, LBBW. "Thanks to Platform, we achieved time savings of 80 percent in our risk management processes. Our risk assessments take significantly less time. Another important criterion for our decision was the solution's ease of use. It was not necessary to make code changes to any of our applications." Government Acceleration Center Drives Superior Knowledge and Intelligence Leveraging its extensive experience in high performance computing (HPC), Platform is establishing a Government Acceleration Center in Washington D.C. With Platform's high performance computing (HPC) solutions, government agencies can transform information into superior knowledge, enabling informed decisions on issues such as intelligence or military operations, on a global basis. Working with key partners, including federal integrators, system vendors and software providers, Platform will deliver solutions to enable scientists and researchers to solve increasingly complex Grand Challenge problems in a flat budgetary environment. These solutions include its portfolio of HPC and OGSI-compliant software, including Platform Globus Toolkit(TM) and the recently-announced open-source metascheduler contribution to the Globus Toolkit(TM), the Community Scheduler Framework (CSF). The company also announced recent wins with Japan's Hokkaido University and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Platform's existing government customer base includes the ASCI Grid, U.S. Department of Defense Modernization Program, the Department of Energy labs including Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) and Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL), NASA, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), SUNY Buffalo, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Electronics Acceleration Center Advances Product Quality and Time to Market With most of the top electronics firms as customers, Platform is clearly in a leadership position in the electronics industry. To help electronics, semiconductor and EDA customers leverage grid computing to accelerate time to market and improve product quality, Platform has established an Electronics Acceleration Center in San Jose, California. In addition to its over 80 application integrations with partners such as Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Silicon Metrics, and Synopsys, Platform announced new integration projects with Aldec, Altera, AccelChip, Circuit Semantics, Signal Integrity Software and Xpedion, which will extend Platform's portfolio of solutions and services to help organizations boost accuracy and productivity by optimizing all engineering resources and tools. Platform also announced several new electronics customers, including Adaptec and Qualcomm, further strengthening its market leadership with established customers AMD, EMC, Infineon, Motorola, and Nvidia. A Platform customer for the past eight years, Advanced Micro Devices uses Platform technology to support its design and verification engineering processes around the world. With Platform's grid software, AMD design engineering teams harness thousands of heterogeneous CPUs at their design facilities to run millions of self-contained jobs to bring a fully tested, superior product to market as quickly as possible. "The complexity of our processor designs and the range and number of simulations have increased substantially over the last few years. Platform's grid computing technology has been a vital part of our effort to bring the highest quality products to market as quickly as possible," said Clive Dawson, Manager of Systems Engineering, Computation Products Group, AMD. "With Platform software, we optimized our existing infrastructure to accelerate the design and testing of the new AMD Opteron(TM) processor, ultimately bringing a quality product to market faster than previously possible."