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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 15, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 37
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Systems/Enterprise:
PLATFORM ESTABLISHES GLOBAL GRID
ACCELERATION CENTERS
In response to the growing demand for proven Grid computing solutions,
Platform Computing Inc, a large independent Grid software provider, announced
three global Acceleration Centers to help organizations prepare their
applications and infrastructure for Grid computing. Platform's Grid computing
solutions help organizations improve business performance by increasing
service levels and optimizing IT infrastructure with software designed to
plan, build, run and manage Grids.
The Acceleration Centers are a key part of Platform's strategy to
Accelerate
Intelligence, by providing industry-specific Grid solutions to financial
services, electronics and government customers around the world. Designed to
help customers evaluate the business value of Grid computing, the three
Acceleration Centers will provide technical consulting, application
integration and professional services, in partnership with key system vendors,
application software vendors and professional services organizations. In the
next few weeks, Platform will announce new OGSI-compliant products, key
partnerships and application integrations, which will be offered through the
Acceleration Centers.
"Over the last decade, Grid's business value in the technical computing
markets such as electronics and government has been well established, and we
are encouraged by the strong adoption of our Grid computing solutions in the
business community, such as financial services," said Songnian Zhou, CEO at
Platform. "Our investment in these Acceleration Centers underscores our clear
commitment to provide real, proven business solutions to these industries,
accelerating intelligence in areas such as risk management, derivatives
analysis, actuarial modeling, product design and military analytics."
Financial Services Acceleration Center Mitigates Risk And Reduces
Costs
To facilitate Grid computing's adoption in business computing, Platform has
created a New York-based Financial Services Acceleration Center to serve its
global clients. Working with key partners including IBM, Egenera, HP,
Powerllel and Axiom, Platform will deliver integrated real-time and
parallelized software solutions, including Linux and Windows-based solutions,
to help financial services customers maintain service levels, reduce costs and
mitigate risk.
In addition to its strong financial services customer base including
Deutsche
Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and RBC Financial Group, the company also announced
three new customers:
- Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg (LBBW), the biggest bank in southwest
Germany,
selected Platform LSF to optimize its risk management applications
- Groupe Societe Generale, the third largest corporate and investment bank
in
the Euro zone, chose Platform Symphony in a competitive bid to support its
virtual compute backbone to Grid-enable online, interactive applications
- Capital One, one of the largest providers of MasterCard and Visa credit
cards in the world, works with Platform Professional Services and uses
Platform LSF to Grid-enable key analytic applications to enhance its
competitiveness and agility.
- LBBW, one of Germany's ten largest credit institutions and one of the top
50
banks worldwide, faced severe IT constraints as a result of needing to service
three recently merged financial institutions. The capacity required for
evaluating more than a million loans and securities accounts, ideally at the
same time, was mind-boggling.
"The banking and finance industry is predestined for Grid computing
solutions.
Our business processes can be parallelized and thus made faster and more
efficient than ever before," said Dr. Peter Oellers, head of risk technology
at LBBW. "Thanks to Platform, we achieved time savings of 80 percent in our
risk management processes. Our risk assessments take significantly less time.
Another important criterion for our decision was the solution's ease of use.
It was not necessary to make code changes to any of our applications."
Government Acceleration Center Drives Superior Knowledge And
Intelligence
Leveraging its extensive experience in high performance computing (HPC),
Platform is establishing a Government Acceleration Center in Washington D.C.
With Platform's high performance computing solutions, government agencies can
transform information into superior knowledge, enabling informed decisions on
issues such as intelligence or military operations, on a global basis.
Working with key partners, including federal integrators, system vendors
and
software providers, Platform will deliver solutions to enable scientists and
researchers to solve increasingly complex Grand Challenge problems in a flat
budgetary environment. These solutions include its portfolio of HPC and OGSI-
compliant software, including Platform Globus Toolkit and the recently-
announced open-source metascheduler contribution to the Globus Toolkit, the
Community Scheduler Framework (CSF).
The company also announced recent wins with Japan's Hokkaido University and
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications . Platform's existing
government customer base includes the ASCI Grid, U.S. Department of Defense
Modernization Program, the Department of Energy labs including Los Alamos
National Labs and Pacific Northwest National Labs, NASA, the Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center , SUNY Buffalo and the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
Electronics Acceleration Center Advances Product Quality And Time To
Marke
With most of the top electronics firms as customers, Platform is clearly in
a
leadership position in the electronics industry. To help electronics,
semiconductor and EDA customers leverage Grid computing to accelerate time to
market and improve product quality, Platform has established an Electronics
Acceleration Center in San Jose, Calif.
In addition to its over 80 application integrations with partners such as
Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Silicon Metrics, and Synopsys, Platform announced
new integration projects with Aldec, Altera, AccelChip, Circuit Semantics,
Signal Integrity Software and Xpedion, which will extend Platform's portfolio
of solutions and services to help organizations boost accuracy and
productivity by optimizing all engineering resources and tools.
Platform also announced several new electronics customers, including
Adaptec
and Qualcomm, further strengthening its market leadership with established
customers AMD, EMC, Infineon, Motorola and Nvidia.
A Platform customer for the past eight years, Advanced Micro Devices uses
Platform technology to support its design and verification engineering
processes around the world. With Platform's Grid software, AMD design
engineering teams harness thousands of heterogeneous CPUs at their design
facilities to run millions of self-contained jobs to bring a fully tested,
superior product to market as quickly as possible.
"The complexity of our processor designs and the range and number of
simulations have increased substantially over the last few years. Platform's
Grid computing technology has been a vital part of our effort to bring the
highest quality products to market as quickly as possible," said Clive Dawson,
manager of systems engineering of the Computation Products Group at AMD. "With
Platform software, we optimized our existing infrastructure to accelerate the
design and testing of the new AMD Opteron processor, ultimately bringing a
quality product to market faster than previously possible."
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