Nimbis Services, Inc. announces manufacturing vertical apps development and hosting service DARPA Award

May 16, 2011

Nimbis
Columbus, Ohio (May 16, 2011) - Nimbis Services, Inc. announced the company has been awarded two-year DARPA Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Application Domain Portal Hosting Service project.

Nimbis Services will deliver a first-of-its-kind open portal vertical application development environment, a hosting service for vertical application products, and an integrated web-based electronic commerce (ecommerce) system designed to broaden the use of digital analysis computing and model-based simulation by the chain of manufacturers supplying the Tier 1 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). “The goal of expanded usage will be accomplished by encouraging developers and entrepreneurs to produce highly tailored digital manufacturing models based on simulation applications and domain-specific portals” says Robert Graybill, Nimbis Services, president and CEO.  “In addition, developing new resources on an on-demand as-needed basis similar to the iPhone APPs business model increases accessibility and use.”

The Phase 2 technical objectives based on Nimbis Services’ extensive understanding of the target market drivers, portal developer and user requirements are as follows:

  1. Develop an end-user friendly digital manufacturing e-commerce storefront ecosystem that enables supply chain manufacturers to rapidly access and perform digital analysis computing using a SaaS model.
  2. Develop an environment that enables commercial vendors, universities, and entrepreneurs to easily design their own digital manufacturing domain-specific portal implementations as plug-ins to the Nimbis hosting service.
  3. Prototype, demonstrate and beta test an integrated portal vertical APPS ecosystem

The end commercial product will be a tightly integrated turn-key commercial package, incorporating a portal development environment, a hosting service for the new domain-specific portal application products, and a web-based ecommerce digital manufacturing portal storefront.

“Our experience is that domain-specific portal applications are more fully embraced by a larger contingent of companies,” said Ashok Krishnamurthy, interim co-executive director at the Ohio Supercomputer Center.  “For example, the Edison Welding Institute EWI Weld Predictor portal, a web-based interface generated by OSC, has allowed over 100 companies to run thousands of jobs simulating “virtual” welds, greatly reducing the time and material wasted with physical prototypes,.”

The DARPA SBIR seeks to enhance or to lower the technical computing access barriers for companies in the Department of Defense supply chain and manufacturing base by developing an online marketplace for on-demand application domain portals or application services driven by high performance computing.

About Nimbis Services, Inc.
Nimbis Services, Inc. is a privately held technology corporation bringing an innovative technical computing market place to the cloud computing industry. Nimbis offers a suite of brokerage and ecommerce web services that connects users with third-party high performance computing (HPC) resources, commercial application software, and domain-specific expertise. Nimbis provides low-risk, low-effort, on-demand, "pay-as-you go" access to HPC for small to midsize businesses who are currently unable to move beyond technical computing on the desktop. A differentiating characteristic of our users is that they tend to be experimental and occasional HPC users, regardless of their size. Please visit www.nimbisservices.com for more information.

About OSC
The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) addresses the rising computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation and analysis. OSC empowers scientists with the vital resources essential to make extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy, and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required to secure 21st century jobs. For more, visit http://www.osc.edu/.