INDUSTRY

GridIron Software Grid Computing Technology To Be Included With Adobe After Effects Professional Software -- GridIron Software, a leading developer of grid computing solutions, today announced an agreement with Adobe Systems Incorporated to provide the first commercially available solution for consumers and small to medium businesses to harness the power of grid computing. Adobe plans to include a version of GridIron Software's grid computing technology, GridIron XLR8(TM), with the next release of its Adobe(R) After Effects(R) Professional software. Adobe After Effects Professional delivers the speed, precision and powerful tools to produce visually innovative motion graphics and effects for film, video, DVD and the Web. Adobe will use GridIron Software's grid computing technology to increase the speed of the preview and rendering capabilities of Adobe After Effects by dividing and distributing the work ordinarily performed on a single computer among several computers joined together in a network. "GridIron's technology provides Adobe After Effects with increased speed at a low cost without the need to spend time allocating resources or configuring your network," said Steve Kilisky, group product manager for Adobe After Effects. "Adobe After Effects Professional users are now unleashed from time or processing constraints that previously limited their creative efforts." To date, the resources and expertise necessary to deploy commercial grid software has limited its use to high performance computing and large enterprise markets. GridIron's unique application-embedded approach requires no special skills for end-users to deploy and yields tremendous benefit with as little as two computers, allowing the benefits of grid computing to be realized for the first time in non-traditional markets, such as digital content creation. "GridIron XLR8 is simple enough for everyone to reap the benefits of the grid," said Ahmar Abbas, managing director of Grid Technology Partners, an industry analyst firm. "Offering fast performance and ease of use, GridIron makes the prospect of mainstream commercial viability and use of grid computing even more compelling." The bundled grid technology is expected to provide linear performance improvement, so preview and rendering will be completed nearly twice as fast on two computers than on one, three times as fast on three computers, and so on. Setting up a grid to achieve this increased speed is accomplished by installing the GridIron XLR8 and After Effects software components and connecting the computers together via a network. "With Adobe's pioneering implementation of GridIron XLR8, grid technology has found practical use outside of traditional high performance computing applications in academia and large enterprises," said Steve Forde, co-founder, president and chief technology officer of GridIron. "This industry first underscores our mission to simplify the previously complex and difficult task of coding software applications to run faster in parallel on multiple computers for consumers and enterprises of all sizes." GridIron XLR8 features a unique, patent pending peer-to-peer architecture that allows the computers to discover each other and automatically set up a processing network, distribute work, and recover from failure. No administration, configuration or ongoing management is necessary.