BALTIMORE, SC2002 - To meet the complex computing needs of high-performance computing (HPC) users in government, Platform Computing today announced Platform Computing Federal, Inc. (PCFI). Building on a decade of government and HPC experience, Platform Federal will provide dedicated sales, support, professional services, and program staff, including cleared personnel, to develop and customize distributed and Grid computing software solutions for the U.S. Federal Government, as well as state and local governments. Platform Federal will leverage the company's extensive experience in providing HPC software solutions and its partnerships with federal integrators, system vendors and application providers. Platform's government customer base includes the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, NASA, and other civilian and intelligence agencies. Platform recently announced significant customer engagements with the Department of Energy (DOE)'s Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. Platform Federal will be headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and led by HPC industry veteran Rene Copeland. During the past 20 years, Copeland has served in several key executive and management positions in the high- performance computer industry, including senior positions at Cray, SGI and IBM. Most recently, he was Vice President, Americas Sales for Cray Inc., where he managed the North American sales force including the Cray Federal group. "Tasked with solving the most complicated, 'grand scale' challenges associated with computational science, economics, design and engineering, government agencies are increasingly turning to Grid computing to exploit the full power of their computing infrastructures," said Rene Copeland, president, Platform Federal. "Platform Federal will dedicate resources to this specialist market to develop powerful, fast and secure solutions capable of tackling compute-intensive work. Ultimately, when matched with the speed and security of high-performance computing, our solutions can transform information into superior knowledge, yielding 'decision superiority' - the ability to rapidly make and implement more informed decisions on issues such as intelligence or military operations, on a global basis." Platform Federal's prestigious Board of Directors will include: Oliver "Buck" Revell, president of the Revell Group International and former assistant director of the FBI; Dr. Adam Drobot, senior vice president of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and head of research and development at Telcordia; and Harry Shoyster, vice president of MPRI and former Army Lieutenant General and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Platform was the first company to commercially support the Globus Toolkit(TM), widely used in government and research, through Platform Globus(TM). In July, Platform Globus was adopted by Sandia National Laboratories to manage the ASCI (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) Grid, which securely connects three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Labs, including Sandia National Labs (Albuquerque, NM), Lawrence Livermore National Lab (Livermore, CA) and Los Alamos National Lab (Los Alamos, NM), in the world's largest Grid. "In the federal government, there is great demand for HPC resources, as teams of scientists and researchers seek access to computers powerful enough to execute their large-scale and Grand challenge projects," said Debra Goldfarb, group vice president, worldwide systems and servers, IDC. "Grid computing is a powerful operational concept to drive greater efficiencies and to gain better leverage of existing HPC resources. We expect Grids to continue their upward growth, particularly within enterprises looking to bridge complex organizational boundaries, and manage escalating IT costs, while improving productivity and collaboration." According to IDC(1), Grid computing represents a shift in the focus of technical computing toward providing more complex and capable infrastructures and away from providing more powerful component-level technology. Grid computing can allow greater access to resources, including specialized high- performance systems, provide an efficient and generalized mechanism for data communications and transport, provide underlying structures for collaboration, and create a new approach to very high-end parallel computing. With over ten years experience in HPC, Platform deployed distributed and Grid computing software solutions across the research and development, defense, life sciences, mechanical design automation (MDA), and electronic design automation (EDA) industries.