INDUSTRY

TORONTO, CANADA -- To improve the quality and speed of scientific results, Platform Computing Inc., a leader in distributed computing software, and SciTegic, Inc, a leader in discovery data pipelining software, announced today the Platform Life Sciences Suite, the industry's first fully-automated in silico discovery solution. Through a strategic partnership with SciTegic, Inc., Platform is combining its workload management software, Platform LSF and Platform JobScheduler, with SciTegic's Pipeline Pilot(TM), a high-throughput data analysis and mining system for drug discovery informatics, to deliver a comprehensive data pipelining solution that will accelerate time to discovery. "Drug discovery data is being grossly underutilized, due to the combination of increasing volumes and types of data, the dependence upon computational methods, and the inflexibility of legacy systems. This solution will accelerate life science research and provide our global customers with a new approach to address this emerging crisis in informatics," said Yury Rozenman, Director, Life Sciences Business Development, Platform. "SciTegic is pioneering the data pipelining approach, and by integrating with our workload management capabilities, we can ensure that the speed and quality of data analysis is not restricted by the IT system." By maintaining dependencies among individual execution steps within a pipeline, Platform Life Sciences Suite ensures the automatic execution of each job, while delivering more predictable and reliable results, from R&D to regulatory approval. This solution provides users with visible improvements in the utilization of distributed compute resources, overall performance and scalability. It also provides reusable pipeline protocols, ensuring that intellectual property, processes, and procedures can be easily documented and repeated. As a result, users can make more intelligent decisions about compute resources, while providing the flexibility to efficiently control customized pipeline data flows. "We selected Platform as a strategic partner based on its reputation, the quality of its software solutions and extensive experience in life sciences," said J.R. Tozer, Ph.D., vice president, marketing, SciTegic. "Together, we can offer a solution that saves scientists' time and utilizes all enterprise resources, with tremendous flexibility for analysis. By processing diverse collections of data collectively in real-time, scientists are not constrained by what has been pre-calculated and stored in a single monolithic database. When used together, Platform LSF and Pipeline Pilot will provide uncompromising workload management and analysis capabilities." Platform LSF and Platform JobScheduler address the high-throughput computational and jobflow requirements of modern life sciences computing environments by providing transparent and on-demand access to heterogeneous computing resources. Pipeline Pilot(TM) allows disparate data sets to be merged, analyzed, or manipulated with tremendous flexibility and provides support for third party tools like Oracle, ISIS(TM)/Host, ISIS(TM)/Base, RS3, and Spotfire DecisionSite(TM). Together, they streamline the data pipelining process by automating the management, scheduling and processing of data analysis pipelines across distributed computing environments. This unique end-to-end solution offers a convenient and seamless approach to running more analyses, accelerating throughput, and tackling complex computations. Platform Life Sciences Suite integrates seamlessly with all major Unix and Linux based platforms including Compaq, HP, IBM, Sun, SGI and Linux. It will be available through Platform and its global resellers in Canada, China, Europe, Israel, Japan, Korea, Singapore, the U.S. and Taiwan. Further information is available at www.scitegic.com or www.platform.com.