By Allan Maurer
RESTON, VA—Making designer molecules from strands of DNA has the potential to help change drug discovery into drug design, but until recently, the computational requirements were daunting. Parabon Computation’s Frontier Grid platform, which puts the idle cycles of thousands of computers to work, can change that, says CEO and founder Steve Armentrout.
Founded in 1999, Parabon raised angel funding and recently landed a NASA SBIR grant, but otherwise has depended on organic growth, Armentrout tells TechJournal South. The company is not currently seeking venture money, he adds.
The company sells high performance computing as a service. “The software can be deployed across any platform and takes advantage of an organization’s existing capacity,” says Armentrout. That’s a factor he thinks will help the company make sales in this down economy, as companies look for ways to leverage resources already in house.
“About 80 percent or more of most computer capacity goes unused,” he explains. “So this can be a dramatic cost savings and enabler.”
Grid systems are not new. Many people are familiar with the SETI at home program that uses donated computer processing time to test incoming signals from radio telescopes for signs of extraterrestrial life and similar programs that work on protein folding or perform other large computation problems.
Essentially, Grid systems use otherwise idle computer processing cycles to crunch small parts of big problems on many machines.
In addition to making it possible for a company or organization to put the excess capacity of its own machines to work, Parabon inks contracts with universities to use their excess capacity, which it aggregates and makes available to its customers for a fee.
“Lots of domains have data heavy computing problems,” Amentrout notes. They include financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies, the Department of Defense and intelligence communities, energy and nanotechnology.
It is an Enterprise-level product, Armentrout notes.
The Department of Defense is a big recent win for Parabon. DOD is deploying its Frontier Grid platform on 10,000 computers.
The DOD’s Defense Contracting Management Agency plans to use Parabon Crush, a distributed computing statistical modeling application to run financial forecasting models on more than 300,000 active contracts.
Armentrout says Parabon developed its platform from the ground up to be an online service, so security was built in as a paramount design criterion, as were usability and tools to make it quickly productive.
The platform supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. “It sits quietly in the background until capacity is available,” says Armentrout. “It even automatically reroutes unfinished computations to other computers.”
He says that it differs from Amazon’s popular EC2 cloud computing service in several ways and told the publication High Productivity Computing Wire that Parabon’s “own benchmarks show that a dime spent buying a computation hour from Parabon gets users about three times the capability of that same dime spent in Amazon’s cloud.”
“The array of things you can do with this technology is impressive,” Armentrout says.
One use is to help researchers create new nanostructures—essentially designer macro molecules—from DNA strands. Optimized, those structures could be put to work in cancer therapy, detergents and many products in between.
“You could functionalize those structures with a metal for nano-antennas or perhaps with proteins as a recognition system for cancer cells. But what makes it possible is large-scale affordable computation on demand. You can’t even contemplate problems of this magnitude without it.”
Online: www.parabon.com
© 2009, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
