DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / AUGUST 11, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 32    ( Table of Contents )

Applications:

COMPANIES TO TRANSFORM RESEARCH WITH GRID COMPUTING

United Devices, a market leader in secure grid solutions, announced that the company has partnered with life sciences software company, Optive Research Inc., to develop software for computer-assisted drug discovery (CADD) specifically optimized for United Devices' grid computing platform. The partnership will allow pharmaceutical companies to speed lead identification and lead optimization phases of the drug discovery process and will result in the development of novel cheminformatic and molecular design software that was previously impossible or impractical.

"The most obvious benefit of supporting the United Devices Grid MP platform will be to give our customers the ability to obtain CADD results much faster than by simply using individual high-end servers or clusters," said Bryan Koontz, vice president of marketing at Optive Research. "More importantly, however, grid computing will enable Optive to develop software that gives life science researchers the ability to do things differently and more completely, reducing the traditional compromise between speed and scientific rigor."

Optive Research, which recently announced the corporation's launch, was created by respected scientist Professor Robert S. Pearlman to help researchers bring beneficial chemical compounds, primarily new drugs and agrochemicals, to market faster and at a lower cost. The company currently has over 15 software products -- many of them being used to reduce discovery cycle times and improve the quality of lead compounds at every major pharmaceutical company in the world.

"Many pharmaceutical companies are starting to realize that grid computing can be an important source of competitive advantage in drug research and development," said United Devices' Director of Global Grid Services, Piush Patel. "Grid-enabling key discovery applications such as those in Optive's software portfolio is an important first step in increasing the speed and scope of molecular research."

United Devices' Grid MP Enterprise platform collectively harnesses the latent power of existing clusters, servers, desktops and workstations into a massive virtual cluster, enabling the acceleration and refinement of research and analysis projects. The platform is now available with Optive's DiverseSolutions(tm) software for chemical diversity and library design. It will also soon be available with the company's software for conformational searching and sampling (Confort) as well as de novo molecular design (EA- Inventor).