NEWS BRIEFS
Fairfax, VA. — Parabon Computation presented for community review the Frontier Application Programming Interface (API), the first commercially available programming interface to a general-purpose Internet computing platform. Research teams, application developers and programmers will use the API to access Frontier – Parabon’s massive, commercial, distributed computing system. Currently, Parabon is working with third-party application vendors to develop software in different industries for its general-purpose platform.
With the new API, any programmer can develop applications to run on Frontier. Because Frontier is a general-purpose platform it can support any algorithm or application, opening new possibilities in the biotech, pharmaceutical and financial industries, as well as applications in countless fields – such as fluid dynamics, wireless transmission, semiconductor chip design, and load testing.
“The API is the key that unlocks the power of Internet computing,” said Jim Gannon, CTO of Parabon Computation. “This allows programmers to develop capabilities beyond the limitations of a static, compute-bound environment.”
Parabon has developed a variety of applications that take advantage of Frontier’s burst compute power to advance science and business: Prospector, a protein sequence comparison for analysis of massive datasets serving the biotech and pharmaceutical industries; Exhaustive Regression, for analysis of any number of variables in all possible combinations serving health sciences, environmental research, and financial modeling industries; and Vegas, a photo-realistic animation rendering serving film, television, video game, and digital entertainment industries.
“We’ve already demonstrated the benefit of Frontier to the bioinformatics, financial modeling, and digital-rendering industries,” said Steven L. Armentrout, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Parabon Computation. “Now that same power is available to anyone who wants to develop their own application.”
The Frontier API provides an easy-to-use programming interface for the Frontier Internet computing platform. The API consists of two primary components, The Task Runtime API and the Client API.
The Task Runtime API is the interface used to create tasks to run on the Pioneer compute engine, the software distributed across Parabon’s Internet network that provides the power for Frontier. The Client API, implemented by the client library, provides a set of functionality used by a client application to communicate with the Frontier server for submitting, monitoring, and controlling tasks. Functionality falls into several different categories:
* Performing communications with the Frontier server
* Specifying and submitting jobs and tasks
* Listening to and observing jobs and tasks
* Controlling and removing jobs and tasks
* Running tasks locally without submitting to the server
The Frontier API is designed so that average PCs can launch and control enormous jobs – all from a client’s desktop. Frontier runs tasks in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), however, this does not mean an application has to be written entirely in Java. In fact, aside from task code itself, the only part of an application that must use Java is the piece that communicates with the Frontier server via the Client API. An existing application written in C++ can easily be ported to Frontier.
Programmers, developers, researchers, and press are invited to download the white paper detailing Frontier API specifications at Parabon’s Web site, http://www.parabon.com , and to offer feedback by taking part in a moderated mail list.
============================================================