| With Base One
distributed
computing technology, large-scale business and scientific applications are significantly less expensive to build, maintain, and
administer... and they are faster to implement. Base One's software harnesses the power of a large, diverse collection of
Windows desktop PCs
and servers. Applications running on these
computers can be managed through a unique grid architecture, which runs
on any of the leading databases (i.e. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle,
Sybase, MySQL).
An essential feature contributing to the
scalability, robustness, and security of this architecture is its
concept of Batch Job Servers, the logical
processing units comprising a "virtual supercomputer".
Each Batch Job Server corresponds to a single-user desktop, a
rack-mounted PC, a blade of a blade server, or a high-powered server
machine, running any Windows client or server OS (from Windows 2000 through Windows Server 2003).
Batch Job Servers independently and asynchronously search out work that
they can perform, coordinated through a central database.
Pioneering efforts have demonstrated the
tremendous potential for massively parallel systems to tackle
computationally intensive problems, such as:
- data mining & data warehousing
- financial forecasting & portfolio
analysis
- large-scale transaction processing
- drug discovery, e.g. protein folding
- environmental modeling
- seismic data interpretation
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Until recently, the
power of grid computing has been confined to the laboratory and
those select few who could afford to invest in highly
specialized, experimental systems. Base One is the first (and only) company
to offer general purpose, "shrink-wrapped" software
for developing large-scale applications to run on loosely coupled
assemblages of PCs and database
servers. The benefits of Base One's approach derive not
from specialization, but just the opposite: employing ordinary,
under-utilized computer resources and using well established
software technologies for database management and rapid application
development. This dramatically reduces the total cost
of ownership (TCO), with savings on the cost
of new equipment and accompanying system software, as well as
lower cost of programming. The net result is faster development and deployment of maintainable, production applications.
More about Base One's grid computing architecture
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