INDUSTRY

Parabon Computation announced today a licensing deal for the deployment of the company’s Frontier Grid Platform on 10,000 computers within the Defense Contracting Management Association (DCMA). Three Wire Systems, LLC is the authorized Parabon partner that facilitated the transaction and is providing program management. DCMA is responsible for more than 300,000 active contracts for the Department of Defense (DoD), valued at over $1 trillion dollars. Through these contracts DCMA helps DoD manage one of the largest and most important supply chains in the world. For its first use of Frontier, the agency plans to use Parabon Crush, a deep statistical modeling application that leverages the power of a Frontier grid, to develop financial forecasting models able to predict which contracts are at risk of late delivery and cost overrun. Advance warning of such issues, through predictive modeling, allows proactive management and risk mitigation measures to be implemented, which can save not just millions of dollars, but more importantly, lives on the battlefield. The sheer number of contracts involved, along with the large number of potentially explanatory variables that can inform such risk models, practically requires the power of a computational grid for effective model calibration in a timely fashion. Rather than purchase expensive high-performance computing hardware for the job, DCMA will use Parabon’s Frontier software to harness the idle capacity of computers within its enterprise infrastructure to generate the computational power to drive these models. This is accomplished without affecting normal operations through a software solution with a greater than 25:1 ROI improvement over a hardware procurement of comparable power. “The DoD has millions of computers and just like those used in industry, on average 90% of their computational capacity goes unused, simply because the capacity required for normal activities is far less than for peak usage,” said Dr. Steven Armentrout, Parabon President and CEO. “We have addressed the grid security considerations that are unique to the DoD and the intelligence community (IC), so that organizations like DCMA can use the latent capacity of their enterprise and data center computing resources to perform game-changing calculations at a scale not otherwise possible.”