–For immediate release–
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 at: http://daugerresearch.com
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.
