INDUSTRY

TORONTO, CANADA -- Computing Inc., a leader in distributed computing software, has named Rene G. Copeland as vice president, Sales, Government and Life Sciences. Based in Washington, D.C., Copeland will be responsible for organizing and directing the North American sales activities in these rapidly growing market segments. Copeland has served in several key executive and management positions in the high-performance computer industry during the past 20 years, including senior positions at Cray, SGI and IBM. Most recently, he was Vice President, Americas Sales for Cray Inc., where he managed the North American sales force including the Cray Federal group. In his 15-year career at Cray Research, Copeland held a number of sales and management positions, including Assistant to the Chairman. He joined Cray Inc. as Vice President, Sales and Marketing in February 2000, where he managed the marketing efforts and the sales activities in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. "Both government and life sciences organizations share a similar challenge of effectively managing, collecting and analyzing massive quantities of data in the most cost-efficient way possible," said Copeland. "Platform's high performance and Grid computing solutions, combined with its extensive experience in these sectors, makes it the ideal choice to help them meet their computing needs and achieve specific business objectives." "With over 20 years of high performance industry experience, Rene was instrumental in re-establishing Cray Inc in the supercomputer market," said Robert Gordon, CEO, Platform Computing. "We are delighted to have Rene join our management team to help us provide HPC and Grid computing solutions to our government and life sciences customers." Prior to joining Cray Inc., Copeland was manager of the world-wide manufacturing segment at IBM Corp. for the RS/6000 SP supercomputer. From 1995 to 1998, he held a variety of senior positions at SGI Inc., including Managing Director of SGI, PTY Ltd, the SGI sales subsidiary in South Africa, and Director of Planning and Customer Relations. From 1992 to 1994, Copeland was President and CEO of Instrumental, Inc., a Minneapolis-based start-up software company focused on productivity software for the UNIX high-performance computing market. Copeland graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point with a B.S. Electrical Engineering, and received a M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. Platform's distributed computing solutions are being used to help government organizations tackle fundamental problems in mathematics, science and engineering and provide their researchers with access to large quantities of reliable, available compute power. Government and research customers include CERN, the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA), The Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment (ENEA), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Sandia National Laboratories, US National Institute of Health, US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, US Air Force Intelligence Agency, and the US Department of Defense. Platform solutions maximize the processing power and automate the pipeline execution of compute-intensive environments at Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies, including: Abbott Laboratories, Air Liquide, AstraZeneca, BASF, Boehringer Ingelheim, Celera, Cereon Genomics, Dow Chemicals, DuPont, European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), Glaxo SmithKline, Incyte Genomics, Kimberley-Clark Corporation, Merck, Monsanto, Pfizer, Pharmacia, Proctor & Gamble, the Sanger Institute and Structural Genomics. All of the major sequencing centers use Platform's distributed and Grid computing solutions to accelerate scientific research, including Celera Genomics, the European Bioinformatics Institute, Incyte Genomics, and The Sanger Institute. For more information visit www.platform.com.