ENGINEERING

AUSTIN, TX -- United Devices, a leader in distributed computing software and services, announced today that the American Diabetes Association (ADA) has selected United Devices’ MetaProcessor platform to accelerate critical diabetes-related research. The platform will run the Archimedes software application on a 250-PC enterprise grid. Archimedes, developed by Kaiser Permanente, helps health care professionals analyze clinical programs and treatments, develop clinical practice guidelines, evaluate the quality of care, improve the efficiency of care processes, set priorities, and plan diabetes research. The ADA grid will also serve as the test bed for further development of the Archimedes application. "The partnership between the ADA, Kaiser and United Devices is a valuable step forward in diabetes research and clinical care," said Richard Kahn, PhD, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer for the American Diabetes Association. "We will be able to more quickly identify treatment regimens that will have the greatest positive impact for people with diabetes." “The distributed computing system that United Devices is setting up for us will revolutionize not only how we do our work, but the accuracy of the decisions people make about the management of diseases,” said David Eddy, MD, PhD, who with Len Schlessinger, PhD, developed Archimedes for Kaiser Permanente. “Normally, answering a single question on a PC requires 24 to 48 hours. United Devices is helping us reduce the computing time to minutes. This will enable us to put the solutions in the hands of doctors and patients quickly.” Dr. Eddy began Archimedes for Kaiser Permanente in the early ‘90s with support from Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California Region. The project was later brought under the national umbrella at Kaiser Permanente’s Care Management Institute (CMI), where it lives today. CMI is a unique, pioneering institution with a mandate to drive, fund, and catalyze evidence-based care management activities throughout Kaiser Permanente. Plans are for the application to eventually be made available to individuals visiting the American Diabetes Association’s Web page to make recommendations for modification of treatments, behaviors and lifestyles related to diabetes care. Initial deployment is in the American Diabetes Association’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. As the project scope grows, and more processing power is required, additional nodes will be deployed. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. “We’re excited to be working with the American Diabetes Association and Kaiser Permanente to implement a grid solution to help them reduce critical time constraints when responding to patient and clinician needs,” said Ed Hubbard, CEO of United Devices. “This is a prime example of how an organization can leverage existing enterprise resources to address key business needs.” By leveraging assets they already own, enterprises can expand the scope of research, accelerate the delivery of results to market, and drive product quality while controlling or even reducing computing budgets. In most large corporations, the computing power represented by the networked PCs far exceeds the power of traditional high-performance computing assets in the data center. For more information visit www.ud.com