Crunching data from the ionosphere
 
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Last time, we looked at Parabon Computation of Fairfax, Va., and its Frontier platform for aggregating unused computing power for distributed processing of commercial applications.
Parabon's Frontier platform parcels out tasks to providers' computers running its Pioneer compute engine software. Results are returned to the Frontier server and retrieved at the client's convenience.
Parabon says its peer-to-peer system allows customers to purchase a specific amount of computing power at peak or off-peak rates. One of the company's early beta testers is Nomad Research, a Bowie, Md., NASA contractor studying oxygen interactions in the ionosphere where the shuttlecraft flies.
Nomad Research President Dean Pesnell signed up as a Parabon beta tester last summer and completed two runs of quantum mechanical simulations on the system. According to Pesnell, an earlier computation similar to the Parabon run took six weeks on a NASA computer. The Parabon server completed the job in about an hour.
"It was pretty amazing to watch it when it finally worked. I ran it from a dial-up connection," Pesnell said. "It shipped my job - no matter how big it is - to their server, and it's all invisible to me except minor messages that I sent the program on their server. Their server sent messages to me directly and that's how I got the data."
Pesnell notes that Frontier's ability to run legacy code as an executable on a local network behind a firewall probably will be more appealing to organizations, such as NASA, that don't want to convert their code into Java. He adds that security concerns still will be a stumbling block for organizations accessing computers outside their organization.
But the benefits of this form of P2P for parallel processing are hard to ignore. "I'm trying to get some interest here at NASA just as a way to get things started instead of buying a lot of computers that you have to replace next year," Pesnell says.
Nomad Research is now considering using the Parabon system as a possible option for future contracts including real-time analysis of satellite data.
Among Parabon's other clients is West Virginia University. The company is providing computation services to the university to assess patient reaction to chemotherapy, and allows providers to donate cycles for cancer research.
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Ann Harrison is a technology reporter in San Francisco. She can be reached at ah@well.com.
