It has been nearly a decade since we founded Parabon and introduced the commercial market to grid computing. Although our marketing firm at the time successfully advised us to avoid choosing an "e-name" for the company, we nevertheless could not resist all of the Net forces of the day, which is why we originally described our service as Internet computing. After the dotcom crash revised the Recommended Daily Allowance of "e" and "Internet" language, I was pleased to see the widespread adoption of the term grid computing because of the strong parallels between the electricity grid and the computation grid. Although the marketing machinery at various "Big Iron" hardware vendors has somewhat diluted the definition of grid computing to mean practically any distributed computing solution that promotes the sale of more computers, to us it still conveys what we have always aimed to provide — a high-performance computation (HPC) utility that is as easy to access as electricity from a wall socket.
Extending the electric power analogy... For far too long now, use of most High-Performance Computing applications has required the skill of a Master Electrician. One great counterexample is online search, which, despite the complexity of the calculations involved, has been delivered so simply that practically anyone can use it, just like a wall socket. That's how it should be!
Our aim has always been to provide a platform atop which grid-powered applications can be easily developed and then delivered as pay-as-you-go services that are simple to use. With our brand-new website and the Frontier Dashboard interface, I think we've taken a significant step toward "wall socket accessibility." As always, Frontier allows computation to be accessed as a service and utilized by many types of applications, but now, the Frontier Dashboard also provides a framework for deploying and executing grid-enabled web applications.
You could do this before, but it required more effort. Now, via the Dashboard, developers have a more convenient means of standing up grid-powered applications and users enjoy a simple and consistent interface. And, because the Dashboard is browser based, you can drive a Dashboard app at, say, 1 kC of power, right from your cell phone — arguably the best "wall socket" through which to connect to the Internet.
[For developers only: It's one thing to launch a Google search query from your phone and then consider all the computational muscle being employed to deliver your result; it's quite another when suddenly it's your application that's commanding that level of power!]
The Frontier Dashboard and its related interfaces are in limited beta, but are scheduled to be released in the next couple of weeks. We hope you find the new features compelling and useful. Meanwhile, if you have any questions, comments or suggests, we'd enjoy hearing from you.
