Parabon Crush Enhanced with Search Algorithm Developed for NASA to Deliver Unmatched Statistical Data Mining and Modeling Capabilities

Deep Analytics Now Possible on Challenging, High-Dimensional Datasets
RESTON, Va.--(Business Wire)--
Parabon Computation, a veteran provider of extreme-scale grid computing software
and services, announced today the latest release of Parabon Crush™, a massively
scalable, statistical data mining and predictive modeling application that draws
its power from Parabon`s Frontier® Grid Platform. Now enhanced with a search
algorithm developed for NASA, Crush uses the idle capacity of thousands of
computers on a Frontier Grid to discover optimal statistical models within
high-dimensional datasets that are too computationally challenging for
traditional approaches.

Crush statistical models can be used to identify hidden correlations, explain
variability and predict future phenomena in practically any domain. Dr. William
Petros, Pharm. D., of the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center, has used Crush to
identify genomic markers that indicate whether a patient will respond to
particular chemotherapies. He stated, "Crush revealed significant explanatory
models that previous conventional approaches used by experienced, Ph.D.
statisticians failed to find." In industry, Crush has been put to such diverse
uses as forecasting stock performance and generating psychometric models of
consumer preferences. Government customers have used it to forecast contract
overruns and determine the causal factors for the spread of West Nile Virus.

Economists see Crush as a welcome analytical complement to the deluge of
information being made available under the transparency initiatives of the Obama
administration, such as Data.gov - an online catalog of U.S. Federal datasets.
Dr. Antony Davies, Associate Professor of Economics and Statistics at Duquesne
University, stated, "Crush allows us to develop statistical models over large
datasets that are practically impossible to analyze otherwise. Having all the
data in the world is of very little value without analytical tools like Crush to
extract value from it." Davies, a researcher in the fields of econometric and
psychometric modeling, went on to say, "The last mile in transparency is
analysis. Transparent data can be a double-edged sword because analysts don`t
always know what data is valuable and what data is irrelevant. Crush makes
transparent data truly valuable by delivering the combination of computing power
and analytic tools necessary for separating the valuable from the irrelevant."

Earlier versions of Crush performed exhaustive searches, examining every
possible candidate statistical model, but many datasets have so many
combinations of factors that they can never be exhaustively analyzed. For
example, it would take 4M years to exhaust a dataset with just 100 factors, even
using 10B computers, each evaluating 1M models per second. The latest version of
Crush employs a novel evolutionary algorithm that searches arbitrarily large
model spaces deeply and effectively without needing to exhaust them. The
so-called Opportunistic Evolution (OE) algorithm, which is part of Parabon`s
Origin Evolutionary Software Development Kit, is a combination of genetic
algorithms specifically designed to maximally leverage grid-scale capacity,
enabling Crush to discover important statistical relationships that are
practically impossible to find otherwise.

The new release of Crush can be installed as a Microsoft® Excel® Add-in,
enabling modeling runs entirely from within Excel. Crush can also be called from
the command line, facilitating its incorporation into data mining workflows. It
supports a variety of regression models and has a pluggable architecture that
makes it easy to add others. Another example of the growing number of
applications powered by Frontier, Crush can be used online across the Parabon
Computation Grid or within the enterprise running atop Frontier Enterprise.

"With the addition of evolutionary search, Crush has become the super-powered
statistical modeling application that I dreamed of having, nearly fifteen years
ago, while working in the investment field," stated Dr. Steven Armentrout,
Founder and CEO of Parabon. "In fact, it was my investigation into how to power
such an application, and the realization that no general-purpose grid software
platform existed to address problems of this scale, that ultimately led to the
formation of Parabon." He added, "A lot has gone into this release and we`re
eager to see what great results the new version of Crush produces for our
customers."

About Parabon® Computation

Parabon is a veteran provider of grid computing software and solutions,
delivering affordable, extreme-scale Computation on Demand® to customers across
a wide variety of market sectors, including the US Department of Defense and
intelligence community. A year after its 1999 founding, the company launched its
flagship product, the Frontier® Grid Platform - a software solution that
aggregates computational capacity of existing IT resources and delivers it as a
flexible and scalable utility service. Frontier can be deployed internally,
harnessing the excess computing power of an organization's existing enterprise
assets; it can also be deployed across a virtualized data center, providing a
complementary high-performance computing (HPC) service for cloud computing
infrastructures. Finally, customers can tap into the power of the Parabon
Computation Grid, the company`s online utility computing service. For more
information, visit www.Parabon.com.

Media Contact:
Larkin Communications for Parabon Computation
Kim Larkin, 202-391-5205
klarkin@larkincomm.com

Copyright Business Wire 2009