Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 20:53:51 -0700 (PDT) From: nelson@popularpower.com (Nelson Minar) To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: Popular Power releases a Linux client FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Debbie Pfeifer (415) 402-0668 debbie@popularpower.com LINUX VERSION OF FIRST COMMERCIAL DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SOFTWARE NOW AVAILABLE -- Popular Power Delivers Client in Most-Requested Format -- SAN FRANCISCO, July 7, 2000 - Popular Power, the first company to launch commercial distributed computing software, today announced a preview release of its client software for Linux. Linux users can now download the Popular Power software, which has been harnessing the surplus processing power of Internet-connected PCs since the Windows client became available in April. Participants donate their unused computing resources to important research projects and will soon have the option of selling that time to companies with large-scale computing needs. Once downloaded from www.popularpower.com, the Popular Power software operates in the background of Linux machines. When a PC is idle or has spare processing power, the program gets a small piece of a large computing task from the Popular Power server and returns results when complete. Popular Power's general-purpose commercial software differs from that of earlier, non-commercial efforts in its ability to execute different types of jobs, as opposed to single functions. "Linux users fueled a number of early distributed computing efforts, helping the field advance to where it is today," said Nelson Minar, chief technology officer and co-founder of Popular Power. "Strong feedback from our Web site, coupled with a petition on the popular community site freshmeat.net, made Linux the most requested new system for us to support." The company plans to make an open source release of its client software available early next year, as well as source code for some of the non-profit applications running on the system. "Linux developers and users have long understood the power of distributing work across a network, and working together to solve problems," commented Brian Behlendorf, chief technology officer of Collab.net and a Popular Power investor. "It's great to see Popular Power now available to this community." Popular Power's first project, currently running on participants' PCs, is a non-profit research application that uses computer modeling to help better understand and improve influenza vaccines. This application allows participants to donate their time to a meaningful research project, while demonstrating the viability of the system for biomedical applications. Other types of jobs well suited to the Popular Power platform include financial simulations, computer graphics rendering and distributed network applications. On its Web site, the company has created a documentation page detailing the output of the Popular Power client so that Linux programmers can create their own user interfaces. Planned features for future Linux releases include screensavers and interfaces such as WindowMaker dockapps and GNOME applets. In other news, Popular Power announced that it has added proxy support as a new feature in its Windows and Linux clients. Now all Popular Power participants can enable the software to run behind firewalls. The Popular Power runner and computing platform is written in Java, providing a security sandbox that protects participants' computers and files. Headquartered in San Francisco, Popular Power (www.popularpower.com) launched the first commercial distributed computing software in April 2000. The privately held company is funded by a group of angel investors including: Brian Behlendorf, CTO and founder of Collab.net and president of the Apache Software Foundation; Max Metral, CTO of PeoplePC; Jolly Chen, CEO of Chen Capital LLC and one of the Postgres95 database authors; Michael Smith, CTO, and Maurice Werdegar, VP and investment strategist, both of MetaMarkets.com; Sam Pullara, Dave Brown and Adam Messinger of BEA WebLogic (NASDAQ:BEAS); and Peter Seibel, technical director of Kenamea. # # #