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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.


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