SAN DIEGO, CA -- Entropia, a pioneer in providing PC-based distributed computing grid technology to the enterprise, today announced that it will integrate its enterprise software with that of the Globus toolkit, a core open-source technology that enables Grid computing. The Entropia announcement follows the recent IBM announcement of a major Grid initiative based on Globus technologies. Grid computing aggregates the power of many disparate computers into one large computing resource for business and R&D applications. Entropia's Enterprise distributed computing grid software harnesses this power from very large numbers of installed Windows PC's. Globus' software harnesses this power from non-PC computers, and is a widely accepted middleware standard for creating Grids across multiple physical locations and institutions. The combination of the two technologies will allow enterprise customers to further accelerate time to market and leverage their sunk cost in IT infrastructure by augmenting their existing high performance computers with the vast computational and storage resources in desktop PCs made accessible through Entropia's technologies. The integrated software will allow enterprises to submit computationally intensive jobs to a heterogeneous computing resource using the Globus protocols. The Globus protocols will also allow these resource pools to be federated across institutions in the form of shared Grids. As previously announced, Entropia's PC-based Enterprise distributed computing technology is currently being piloted by Bristol-Myers Squibb's Pharmaceutical Research Institute (NYSE: BMY) and Novartis (NYSE: NVS) in addition to others not publicly announced. "We are excited to see Entropia, a leader in desktop distributed computing Grids, adopting Globus protocols to increase interoperability for users and applications," said Ian Foster of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. "Commodity PCs are the most widely available computing resource, and Entropia's ability to aggregate this CPU power provides the heretofore missing piece of the overall capability Globus provides: linking multiple computers of different types to create a large `virtual computer,'" he said. "This effort combines the capabilities of Entropia and Globus, extending the reach of both, which is crucial to the growth and adoption of Grid technologies," said Carl Kesselman of the University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute. "Entropia has led the way in commodity desktop distributed computing on the Internet and proved in the Enterprise market place that their technology delivers for customers with computationally intensive needs in the same way that Globus has proved valuable in linking non-commodity computing resources to do the same," he said. Drs. Foster and Kesselman are the co-leaders of the Globus Project. "The use of open-source based Globus technologies and protocols is a key part of IBM's Grid Computing initiative and is crucial to expanding Grid computing worldwide," said David Turek, vice-president for emerging technologies at IBM. "Entropia's collaboration with Globus is another step forward in helping businesses create virtual organizations that share applications, data and computing power to collaborate, tackle large problems and lower the cost of computing," he said. "In today's economic climate, enterprises are adopting computing technologies that allow them to do more with what they already own. Entropia's Enterprise product achieves this goal. Our collaboration with Globus, which is widely recognized as the premiere middleware for Grids based on Unix, naturally complements Entropia's product strength on Windows desktops. The planned integration is an important step toward a comprehensive infrastructure for enterprise Grids," said Andrew Chien, chief technology officer and co-founder of Entropia Inc. For more information visit www.entropia.com