DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /    ( Table of Contents )

Applications:

BASE ONE RELEASES TOOLS FOR BUILDING COMMERCIAL GRID APPS

Base One International Corp, a supplier of software for developing Grid and cluster computing applications, announced a major upgrade to its programmer's toolkit. This version extends their successful software for building Windows cluster and Grid computing applications with Visual C++ to support the other main .NET programming languages: C#, Visual Basic.NET and ASP.NET.

The announcement continues Base One's advances in Microsoft's .NET architecture, while maintaining backward compatibility with the older COM and MFC technologies. Base One's customer proven and U.S. patented software supports the major databases in the marketplace (from IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and Sybase) and can run against Windows, Linux/Unix, AS/400, and IBM mainframe database servers. The software enables organizations to implement data intensive Grid computing applications, and derive benefits that in the past have been realized by customers who have implemented Grid for scientific, compute intensive work.

Base One's software for building low cost, database and Grid computing applications, makes it practical for groups of Windows computers to be applied to large scale commercial, government and scientific data processing problems. Base One provides the only Grid architecture in the market that does not use a master/slave approach. Instead, the design leverages the transaction processing, integrity and security capabilities provided by high-end databases systems. The result is Grid computing applications that are simpler to design and manage, are fault tolerant, and highly reliable. By using Base One's unique database-oriented approach, customers derive significant benefits, including:

• An order of magnitude decrease in costs and increase in performance.

As additional processors (desktop or server) are added virtually 100 percent of their capacity can be made available to run Grid applications.

• Return on investment measured in months rather than years.

Customers have estimated the cost of developing applications using Base One software can be reduced by as much as 75 percent over other development frameworks, and the people cost to operate and maintain these applications can be reduced by as much as 85 percent.

• High-level database API and data dictionary make it easy to use databases as temporary storage.

Database components support automatic local caching for significantly increased performance and concurrency of intermediate, calculated and pre-fetched data.

• Web Services based on simple, database access.

Communication is modeled as adding, changing and retrieving records in local and remote databases, freeing programmers from coding to specific communications protocols.

"Today's announcement demonstrates Base One's commitment to help customers derive, for the first time, the significant benefits of implementing Grid computing for solving large data processing problems," said Steven Asherman, president and CTO of Base One. "Our software has been proven in customer environments for everyday, back office processing and NOT just supercomputing."

Asherman added, "By extending our development tools to include a wide array of Microsoft .NET programming languages, with lots of samples, our intent is to continue to enable our customers to leverage their in-house development skills."

Asherman will be participating at the Gt'04 (www.gt04.com) Grid Computing Conference in Philadelphia. On Tuesday, May 25 at 3:15 p.m., he will be speaking on "Understanding Grid Deployment Options -- Types of Grids and Tradeoffs." Gt'04 (May 24-26) will gather experts, and outline strategies and road maps for Grid deployment.