OIL & GAS

TurboWorx, Inc. today announced completion of a major element of its recently launched Research and Development (R&D) Workflow Collaboration Initiative. As part of the Initiative, TurboWorx is delivering for Mac OS X a technical computing environment with a common framework for workflow creation and processing. R&D laboratories that heavily depend upon Apple's powerful and reliable operating system now have the ability to openly share data and research advances in a heterogeneous technology environment. As a result, TurboWorx is empowering individuals, groups, companies, and universities to conduct more thorough analysis and accelerate discovery processes. "Academic research organizations embraced collaboration and the development of open source programs long before commercial enterprises, but disparate software tools and the distinct information 'silos' created by homegrown or third party computer networks have limited researchers from openly sharing data and advancing each other's work," said Jeff Augen, president and CEO of TurboWorx. "Through this initiative, we have freed researchers from investing valuable time on extraneous programming while enabling them to take advantage of all the benefits provided by the revolutionary Mac OS X in order to achieve true workflow collaboration and greater efficiency in research and development." "With the Mac OS X providing the power of UNIX in addition to the simplicity of the Macintosh interface, Mac computers are the world class tools for great research and innovation in the sciences and Apple's growing body of scientific users," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "The TurboWorx workflow collaboration product set places programmer skill sets into the hands of research scientists and empowers Mac users to graphically build, configure, and share workflows in a heterogeneous technology environment." Through this initiative, TurboWorx is providing solutions to problems that have traditionally limited academic organizations' abilities to fully leverage the technology available to them. For example, until now, organizations have been forced to implement complex workflows using large PERL or C scripts in order to connect a disparate set of software and applications. While this approach has accomplished the objective of allowing an individual researcher or group to obtain the computational results they need for a particular individual problem, organizations have experienced unintended consequences. Researchers have not had the ability to share both these complex workflows and the knowledge of how to implement them within and between their colleagues and other research organizations. Built upon the established TurboWorx development environment, the R&D Workflow Collaboration product set enables academic research organizations to create components of proprietary, internally developed, and open source programs. Once a vendor develops TurboWorx "wrappers" for its applications, libraries of these components can be assembled and made accessible throughout a university, to companies, and around the world. Constructing workflows is now a matter of pulling together those components needed to run that particular process, enabling workflow collaboration and creating efficiencies in the discovery process.