RETAIL

POWAY, Calif. -- Significantly increasing the speed and accuracy at which the more than 17 million Americans with diabetes can find the best treatments, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) announced it has selected the grid-computing service from Gateway, Inc. (NYSE: GTW) and United Devices, leaders in secure grid solutions. The ADA will use Gateway Processing On Demand(SM) (GPOD), backed by United Device's Grid MP Alliance(TM) platform, to accelerate critical diabetes-related research. The platform will run software to help the ADA analyze clinical programs and treatments, develop clinical practice guidelines, study the efficiency of care processes, set priorities and plan diabetes research. By using GPOD, the ADA has already experienced a dramatic improvement in the time it takes to process a component of diabetes related research -- from 48 hours down to one hour -- and is expecting further reductions in time for improved efficiency. Previously, such calculations stretched the limits of normal computing resources and caused unacceptable delays. "Renting supercomputer time to perform these types of calculations can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars," said Dr. Richard Kahn, chief scientific and medical officer for the American Diabetes Association, a non-profit organization based in Alexandria, Va. "By leveraging thousands of computers on the Gateway grid, we're able to perform our studies quickly and accurately." Conceived as a technique to process information normally handled by supercomputers, grid computing links thousands of PCs to collectively share processing power. Gateway's POD service launched December 2002, joining nearly 7,000 computers in Gateway retail stores across the United States. Unlike several companies that have promised grid computing, Gateway's POD service is available today, ranking it among the top 10 largest supercomputers in the world by processing power. In fact, Gateway's grid can produce more than 11 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second) at peak capacity, with most nodes averaging 2.0 GHz or better. "The beauty of this solution is that customers can take advantage of the high-performance grid computing power of nearly 7,000 PCs without investing upfront capital building their own technology infrastructure," said Bob Burnett, executive vice president and chief technical officer, Gateway, Inc. "Companies pay only for the processing power they need to solve their complex computational problems." While Gateway provides the hardware for the GPOD service, United Device's Grid MP Alliance platform provides the virtual operating system for the grid. Customers submit job requests, get real-time status updates and pick up results when the job is complete -- all covered by United Device's unmatched Grid MP security architecture. To process its data on the grid, the ADA runs what is called "the Archimedes software application," originally developed by Kaiser Permanente. The ADA grid may also serve as the test bed for further development of the Archimedes application. "This is a great example of an application ideally suited for the GPOD," said Ed Hubbard, CEO of United Devices. "Now small and medium-sized companies have such a large amount of compute power available on demand, there is no reason not to reap the benefits of reduced processing time and increased competitive edge."