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From PlugInFinder

The GridIron story chronicles the passion and inventiveness of enterprising individuals who not only tackled and conquered a monumental computing challenge, but did so in a profoundly simple and elegant fashion.

The Large Hadron Collider project at CERN, Switzerland is the provenance for technology manifest in GridIron XLR8(TM). The LHC project had massive computing requirements necessary to process several exobytes of data generated by the collider. Not only was the compute and data capacity vast, algorithms for the analysis of particle physics require extensive interim communication and sharing of results. To successfully process and analyze such an unprecedented amount of tightly coupled data required an inventive approach to high performance computing.

The seemingly impossible challenge captured the imagination of GridIron co-founders Steve Forde, now President and CTO, and Dr. John Swain, Professor of Physics at Northeastern University and a participant in the CERN project. The original founders engaged software architect Tom Moore and advisor Warren Gallagher to assist in tackling the problem of using parallel processing to execute tightly coupled problems of massive proportion.

In short order, the team identified an innovative new approach to address the challenge. The resulting framework they developed not only validated their theories, but also proved so impressive that a group of angel investors involved with some of Canada's greatest technology successes funded further exploratory research and development, and GridIron was born.

Two years of further development and innovation yielded a prototype that achieved spectacular test results. Furthermore, the technology proved applicable not only to large scale tightly coupled physics problems, but to virtually any computationally intensive application in general. The impressive performance, broad applicability and phenomenal potential of the GridIron technology attracted keen interest by a cadre of top tier technology companies. Further and substantial investment was acquired to fund development of a commercial software release and a business plan to take the technology to market. GridIron's development team was doubled and the executive team expanded to add functional coverage of Research and Development, Marketing, Business Development and Operations. GridIron XLR8 not only represents the culmination of more than two years of intensive research and development, it reflects the spirit and ethos of the many talented individuals who collectively comprise GridIron. Excellence and craftsmanship are driving principles. It isn't sufficient to just solve the problem - it must be solved in an elegant and robust fashion. The end result of the talent and determination of the GridIron team, fueled by passion, pride and a mutual fondness for beer, hockey and multiplayer online gaming, is GridIron XLR8 - a breakthrough product that makes it profoundly simple to develop, use and manage applications with the added speed of parallel processing.

Plug-ins by GridIron

• GridIron Flow - Revolutionary Workflow Maps Simplify Creative Pro Design Process
• GridIron Software Nucleo - Make the most of Adobe After Effects on your dual-processor or multi-core workstation.
• GridIron Software Nucleo Pro - Render AND work at the same time.
• GridIron Software X-Factor - Use the power of grid computing technology to significantly improve productivity and streamline your creative workflow.