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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 22, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 38
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Applications:
TurboWorx DELIVERS END-TO-END
SOLUTION FOR MANAGING WORKFLOWS
TurboWorx Inc unveiled its strategy to deliver a suite of solutions for
companies in computationally intensive markets that rely on advanced, parallel
and more recently, Grid computing to solve technical computing problems.
TurboWorx is addressing high-performance computing challenges by providing
software that enables users to maximize productivity by creating, managing,
and processing complex applications, workflows and data in heterogeneous
computing infrastructures.
"The delivery of this product suite marks the successful evolution of
TurboWorx and the integration of technologies acquired from Argentys earlier
this year," said Jeff Augen, president and CEO of TurboWorx. "With a history
rich in life sciences, we are now extending value to companies in other
industries that face similar high-performance computing challenges."
Most engineering, scientific and financial problems are comprised of a
large
number of related but discrete components that define a workflow. Today's
technical computing environments are excellent platforms for distributing and
processing such workflows because they are built using large numbers of
individual machines that are each capable of processing individual components
of a complex calculation. TurboWorx' new suite of products enables workflow
sharing and collaboration, distributed resource management, and accelerated
application execution. As a result, users can solve complex computing problems
by building reusable workflows that will become valuable parts of their
business infrastructures. Moreover, the flexible nature of TurboWorx'
solutions facilitates an ongoing process of experimentation and improvement -
attributes not normally present in previous computing environments that are
built on more traditional scripts and queues.
The TurboWorx product suite, built on the company's open development
environment, consists of TurboWorx Builder, TurboWorx Group, TurboWorx
Enterprise and TurboWorx ClusterManager. The Company's technology framework
supports IBM AIX, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Unix and Solaris. Because it is
designed for heterogeneous infrastructures, the framework facilitates
collaboration across multiple organizations, without the requirement that
participants utilize the same operating system.
- TurboWorx Builder is a development environment in which components and
workflows can be created, saved, tested, and imported/exported to other
Builder environments.
- TurboWorx Group is a single-user distributed computing solution for
running
more demanding workflows. TurboWorx Group is limited to at most five worker
machines, all of which must run the same operating system. Components and data
are shared using the OS file system.
- TurboWorx Enterprise is the deployment of TurboWorx technology that allows
users to run very complex and difficult workflows by distributing the
computations across large heterogeneous computing environments. Multiple users
can collaborate by sharing components and data using a Web Services
framework.
- TurboWorx ClusterManager is a distributed resource management platform for
Linux clusters that enhances application performance by improving resource
scheduling and utilization. With a Web-based interface that includes
sophisticated monitoring and reporting tools, ClusterManager enables users of
the TurboWorx product suite to dynamically allocate and manage resources in
response to changing business goals and objectives.
"All businesses share a common problem -- the need to process information
quickly," said Augen. "Life sciences, energy exploration, manufacturing,
financial services, and government research are just a few examples of
data-intensive industries that have more information to process than they have
computing and processing power available. Our solutions enhance the
productivity of organizations in these industries without requiring additional
investments in hardware or the complete restructuring of the computing
infrastructure."
Life And Material Sciences
Within the life and material sciences markets, in which TurboWorx has a
strong
history and an established customer base, the dramatic advances in information
technology have enabled the use of in silico discovery. Researchers are now
faced with solving complex scientific problems fueled by huge volumes of data.
Computational workflows involving large numbers of discrete steps are the only
suitable solutions to these problems. By making it possible for organizations
to easily create reusable, automated, high-performance workflows, TurboWorx is
enabling a new level of productivity.
Energy Exploration And Production
Energy companies make daily decisions about the management of oil and gas
reservoirs using suites of complex programs that predict future behavior under
various operating conditions. The programs deal with data and mathematical
models reflecting both scientific disciplines (such as geology, geophysics,
petrophysics, chemistry and reservoir engineering), and business issues
related to regulatory and environmental constraints and economics. An immense
amount of data and computation are required, which has led the industry to
become one of the early adopters of parallel and distributed computing.
TurboWorx application workflows are a natural tool for creating and deploying
the program suites, since they make it easy to run the individual programs on
different machines and to automatically route and convert the data between
programs, all as part of a highly-manageable distributed computing process
that incorporates all of the essential business logic.
Manufacturing
The automotive and aerospace industries, among numerous others, routinely
use
"virtual prototyping" involving complex CAD, MCAE and Finite Element
applications in product design and development. Integrating these applications
in a workflow from concept styling, to design, to analysis, to manufacturing,
and looping back improves the end-to-end development process. By automating
this type of iterative design workflow, TurboWorx enables engineering groups
to minimize costly errors, speed development and improve quality. Furthermore,
workflow integration enables global design teams including suppliers to better
collaborate around the clock on specific projects.
Financial Services
Fixed income security pricing typically involves a complex set of
operations
that rivals the computational tasks underlying such purely technical pursuits
as computational fluid dynamics, molecular modeling, and geological structure
prediction. The calculations normally require simulating large numbers of
scenarios that take into account past, present and future financial
environments. Moreover, analysts must predict the effects that different
interest rate environments will have on a portfolio of investments -- hundreds
of securities must often be considered in each calculation. Such calculations
almost always involve a large number of individual components, many of which
have a distinctly parallel nature. TurboWorx solutions help users organize the
individual components into a reusable workflow and take advantage of innate
parallelism. This provides a performance advantage that translates into true
business value for individuals who must respond quickly to a changing
financial climate.
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