Reston, Va.-based Parabon Computation started out of CEO Steve Armentrout's frustration at the limited amount of HPC resources available to him as a researcher. In 1999, the same year that SETI@Home was released to the public and everyone was talking about grid computing, Armentrout started Parabon in an effort to provide the infrastructure to utilize previously idle computer cycles. Parabon -- along with companies of that era such as United Devices (now Univa UD), Entropia, Process Tree, and others -- offered users an opportunity to contribute their cycles to cancer research (an effort it still supports), and enticed volunteers to donate their idle cycles with monthly sweepstakes.

But that was just to get things started. Parabon soon created a business model from its cycle scavenging software, the Frontier Grid Platform. Today the company offers customers the ability to purchase CPU time on a network of servers ("brokered computation") or, for larger enterprises with significant existing IT deployments, the ability to install Frontier in-house to take advantage of excess capacity in its own infrastructure. What kinds of work do Parabon's users do with the resources its software rescues from disuse? "Frontier's users are in energy, finance, DoD, nanotechnology, and other areas," says Armentrout.

The DoD is one of Parabon's large recent wins. In December of 2008, Parabon announced that the Defense Contracting Management Association had inked a deal to deploy its Frontier Grid Platform on 10,000 computers within the DoD. DCMA plans to use Parabon Crush, the company's distributed statistical modeling application, to run financial forecasting models on its over 300,000 active contracts.

As you would expect, Frontier is heavy on the ability to farm out a slew of embarrassingly-parallel jobs -- like parameter space searches, for example -- onto idle resources. Frontier provides an API for developers who want to tightly integrate their application with Parabon's service, and also provides a tool for users to use unmodified applications and farm them out over hundreds of servers. In recent years Parabon has also added the capability to schedule and manage more traditional (i.e., tightly coupled, MPI-sporting) scientific applications as well.

But if you aren't the owner of 100,000 idle desktops over in the Provo Office, and you are a Parabon Computation on Demand customer, where is your job actually running? "Parabon leases idle cycles from the unused resources on university campuses and businesses," says Armentrout. The company owns no hardware, and CEO Armentrout has no plans for that to ever change. Most of its brokered cycles are homed in the US, as are the bulk of Parabon's customers, but Armentrout says the company has a growing presence outside the US as well.

The "get this work done for me somewhere, I don't care where" mindset in Frontier has been central to the company's development from the beginning, and users of Frontier-managed resources don't manage servers or connections. Instead, users manage parcels of work to be completed and job submission, server failure, coordination, and communication are all managed for the user by the software. Parabon says that Frontier is platform agnostic, supporting Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

But how is all this different from, say, what Amazon is doing? Armentrout draws a distinction between cloud computing offerings, like Amazon's EC2, and Parabon's Grid offerings. "EC2 offers a lot of automation and infrastructure for customers to very rapidly deploy a virtual machine, say for e-Commerce, and grow or shrink that capability to match demand. But it's not principally a computation service," says Armentrout. "Our 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."

He explains that this is primarily due to the fact that Amazon may deploy several VMs on each physical server, to ensure that it is getting maximum use of the resources. Frontier users get all of the server they are running on at the time. Frontier and EC2 users alike must provide the application, any libraries, and relevant data files, however the submission process to the respective services highlights their differences. Whereas Amazon users provision VMs and then customize them one-at-a-time (which suits the Web application use case), Frontier has an API that accepts programmatic submission of thousands of computational work requests, which it then automatically executes across available resources, rescheduling work from machine to machine, if it must, to guarantee timely delivery of results.

Armentrout also points out that Parabon's "no hardware" model has enabled it to be successful while other pay-for-computation services, such as Sun's Network.com (which recently closed to new users), have struggled, or failed outright. Although the lack of data available for this privately-held company makes it hard to assess just how successful it has been.

Parabon has been in the news this week as NASA announced the award of a Phase 1 Small Business Innovative Research Grant (SBIR) for feasibility testing of an idea that Parabon calls "Componentized Models as a Service." The idea leverages previous investments that NASA has made to transform the computational building blocks of its scientific models -- a particular oceanographic model for example, or a specific atmospheric discretization -- into components that can be wired together to create a custom application that addresses a particular need. Parabon's task is now to create a Web portal that allows users to compose applications from these components, dynamically compile them into a new application, and then distribute the computation to NASA's compute infrastructure using the Frontier Grid Platform. This is an interesting twist on the often tried, but frustratingly seldom successful grid portal model which simply makes a new interface for existing static applications.

Parabon is partnering with Goddard on this project, which Armentrout says should take about six months. If this trial proves successful, the company could enter into further agreements to expand and enhance the idea for NASA. Armentrout describes Frontier as "a service approach to HPC without the expense of hardware." With this latest announcement the company is trying to parlay its decade of experience in "getting the work done" into a new generation of solutions that help users specify what work is to be done, and how (computationally) to get it done. This kind of work is critical to lowering the usability barriers that IDC and others consistently identify as fundamental obstacles to the widespread adoption of HPC in new and nontraditional areas of computing.