GRIDIRON SOFTWARE ANNOUNCES AGREEMENT WITH ADOBE TO BUNDLE FIRST COMMERCIAL GRID COMPUTING SOLUTION FOR CONSUMERS AND SMALL TO MEDIUM BUSINESSES
- GridIron Software Grid Computing Technology To Be Included With
Adobe After Effects Professional Software --
February 2, 2004, Ottawa, Canada - GridIronTM
Software, a leading developer of grid computing solutions, today
announced an agreement with Adobe Systems Incorporated to provide the
first commercially available solution for consumers and small to medium
businesses to harness the power of grid computing. Adobe plans to
include a version of GridIron Software's grid computing technology,
GridIron XLR8TM, with the next release of its Adobe® After Effects® Professional software.
Adobe After Effects Professional delivers the speed, precision and
powerful tools to produce visually innovative motion graphics and
effects for film, video, DVD and the Web. Adobe will use GridIron
Software's grid computing technology to increase the speed of the
preview and rendering capabilities of Adobe After Effects by dividing
and distributing the work ordinarily performed on a single computer
among several computers joined together in a network.
"GridIron's technology provides Adobe After Effects
with increased speed at a low cost without the need to spend time
allocating resources or configuring your network," said Steve Kilisky,
group product manager for Adobe After Effects. "Adobe After Effects
Professional users are now unleashed from time or processing
constraints that previously limited their creative efforts."
To date, the resources and expertise necessa ry to
deploy commercial grid software has limited its use to high performance
computing and large enterprise markets. GridIron's unique
application-embedded approach requires no special skills for end-users
to deploy and yields tremendous benefit with as little as two
computers, allowing the benefits of grid computing to be realized for
the first time in non-traditional markets, such as digital content
creation.
"GridIron XLR8 is simple enough for everyone to reap
the benefits of the grid," said Ahmar Abbas, managing director of Grid
Technology Partners, an industry analyst firm. "Offering fast
performance and ease of use, GridIron makes the prospect of mainstream
commercial viability and use of grid computing even more compelling."
The bundled grid technology is expected to provide
linear performance improvement, so preview and rendering will be
completed nearly twice as fast on two computers than on one, three
times as fast on three computers, and so on. Setting up a grid to
achieve this increased speed is accomplished by installing the GridIron
XLR8 and After Effects software components and connecting the computers
together via a network.
"With Adobe's pioneering implementation of GridIron
XLR8, grid technology has found practical use outside of traditional
high performance computing applications in academia and lar ge
enterprises," said Steve Forde, co-founder, president and chief
technology officer of GridIron. "This industry first underscores our
mission to simplify the previously complex and difficult task of coding
software applications to run faster in parallel on multiple computers
for consumers and enterprises of all sizes."
GridIron XLR8 features a unique, patent pending
peer-to-peer architecture that allows the computers to discover each
other and automatically set up a processing network, distribute work,
and recover from failure. No administration, configuration or ongoing
management is necessary.
ABOUT GRIDIRON SOFTWARE INCORPORATED
GridIron is a software development company whose mission is to bring
the power of high performance computing to the mainstream by making it
profoundly simple to develop and use software applications with the
added speed of distributed grid computing. GridIron products enable
computationally intensive software applications to run faster on
multiple computers.
For further information, please contact:
GridIron Software, 6 Antares Drive, Phase 1, Suite 100, Ottawa, ON, K2E 8A9
(613) 226-9445 www.gridironsoftware.com
Gord Watts, Vice-President Marketing
Extension 228
gwatts@gridironsoftware.com
Cathy Caldeira, LNS Communications
617-577-9777
ccaldeira@LNScom.com
