Parabon Computation, a veteran provider of extreme-scale grid computing software and services, today introduced a major enhancement of its flagship software product, the Frontier^® Grid Platform. Version 5 of the Parabon solution dynamically manages virtual machines (VMs) across ordinary enterprise computers – from laptops to mainframes – turning enterprise networks into virtualized data centers, thereby increasing the value of existing IT infrastructure.

Frontier 5 integrates virtual machine management throughout the platform, allowing VMs to be programmatically provisioned across potentially thousands of enterprise computing resources. With Frontier 5, organizations can now simultaneously host cloud computing services and power extreme-scale grid applications using their entire enterprise infrastructure, without manual provisioning or disruption of normal operations.

Customers across a wide variety of sectors can maximize the return on investment (ROI) of their existing IT infrastructure with Frontier, which, because of its unmatched security, is currently deployed within challenging IT environments such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the Intelligence Community and NASA. Although it can leverage dedicated hardware, Frontier delivers its highest ROI by harnessing the excess computing power of an organization’s existing computers – many of which operate at a mere 5- to 10-percent CPU utilization. Because it is a turnkey, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution that is both unobtrusive and requires little administration, organizations can quickly and easily deploy Frontier and immediately leverage its benefits.

Parabon’s Frontier 5 behaves as an enterprise-wide application platform of unmatched scale, pervasiveness and efficiency – creating virtual machines as needed across thousands of already deployed devices, whether Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X. With traditional virtualization platforms, IT staff must manually provision each and every virtual machine; Frontier 5's integrated virtual machine management feature enables programmatic provisioning, which automates this process by dynamically scaling the number of VM instances up and down based on demand, without human interaction. In addition, each application can specify or provide its own customized operating system (OS) environment, meaning a modeling and simulation task that has been hand-crafted to run on a specific version of Linux, for example, can be executed on standard Windows PCs or Macs without modification.

“Frontier 5 takes virtualization to the extreme,” said Dr. Steven Armentrout, Parabon’s founder and chief executive officer, “allowing every computer in the enterprise – from laptops to Linux clusters – to dynamically execute multiple jobs and services rather than being limited to a single dedicated function. With Frontier 5, the enterprise becomes a massive virtualized data center.”