Dauger Research, Inc., - IEEE Award to First Major Update of Pooch

First Major Update to Pooch Now Shipping

"Plug and Play" Parallel Computing and Cluster Management Software Gets a Boost

Huntington Beach, California, USA - October 17, 2001 - Dauger Research, Inc., today announced the availability of version 1.1 of Pooch, the Parallel OperatiOn and Control Heuristic application. The latest update introduces its implementation of the AppleScript interface with a host of new features. In addition, Pooch is fully operational and fully supported on Mac OS X 10.1.

The announcement arrives following the presentation of a major industry award to Pooch. On October 10 at the IEEE Cluster 2001 Conference, Pooch was awarded the "Best Commercial Exhibit - Software" prize "for most innnovative commercial software product" exhibited at that international, leading-edge, and authoritative conference on cluster computing.

Pooch is designed to combine powerful, numerically-intensive parallel-computing clusters with the famed ease-of-use of the Macintosh. It provides the user interface for the latest incarnation of AppleSeed, a project begun by a pair of UCLA physics researchers in 1998. Their software is used world-wide for easy-to-use and numerically-intensive parallel computing.

Pooch's new AppleScript implementation opens a wealth of new possibilities for parallel computer users. Jobs may be launched using scripts customized and automated for any particular task. That includes both transient and persistent scripts, such as for customized, automated job queuing tasks. Directing Pooch from OS X's Unix command line is available via a free, open-source utility named plaunch, which operates by translating Unix options into AppleScript commands and executing scripts from the command line. In addition, other applications may use AppleEvents, the communications structure upon which AppleScript is based, to direct Pooch to launch jobs that perform computational tasks. A demonstration of that ability to automate parallel executable launches is present in the latest AltiVec Fractal Carbon demo, available from the Dauger Research web site.

The new version of Pooch also introduces a wide array of new features and bug fixes. The new features include the addition of a heuristic algorithm to utilize the "best" resources found in the cluster, making "Computing Grid"-like behavior possible. Optimizations to Pooch's network implementation were made, improving file transfer speed and launch times. Other features provide OS X-specific abilities, such as Unix-based load measurement of processes and the ability to recognize and parallel launch executables compiled via GCC.

Pooch v1.1 is available now at US$150 for the first compute node then US$100 for each node thereafter. Current users with an active subscription to Pooch will be receiving their free updates shortly.

For further details and a demonstration version of the software, see the Dauger Research web site.

Pooch requires networked Macintoshes running OS 9 with CarbonLib 1.2 or later or OS X 10.1 or later with 4 MB of available RAM and 2 MB of disk space.

Dauger Research, Inc., was incorporated in September 2001 and founded by Dr. Dean E. Dauger. Dr. Dauger is the award-winning author of Atom in a Box and Fresnel Diffraction Explorer and has co-authored award-winning commercial software as early as 1992. After completing his Ph. D. in physics, he founded Dauger Research, Inc., to bridge the divides between the scientifically and technically complex and the mainstream by making high-performance computation and visualization easy to use and accessible to users.