United Devices Continues Expansion Into European Market With Additional Key Customer

Sanofi-Synthélabo Signs On; Company Responds to Increased Demand with UK Office

AUSTIN, Texas, April 16, 2003 — United Devices™, the market leader in secure grid solutions, today announced that the company has secured Sanofi-Synthélabo as a key life science customer and has also established a UK-based office in order to meet growing European demand for its Enterprise MetaProcessor™ platform.

The initial deployment at Sanofi-Synthélabo will be utilized to run large tests using several heterogeneous virtual screening methods to determine which produce the highest quality results. Future project plans around a more comprehensive Virtual Screening System will depend on the successful outcome of these screening tests and would result in a significant expansion of the current deployment.

"Ease of deployment and the availability of applications were strong selling points for us," said Sanofi-Synthélabo Head of Discovery IT, Olivier Gien. "We also needed proven scalability and security and knew from United Devices' other enterprise deployments and their work with their public Grid that massive scaling and security capabilities were already proven."

United Devices' Enterprise MetaProcessor platform allows customers to efficiently harness existing IT resources as a virtual supercomputer for high-throughput screening. When evaluating the appropriate technology solution, Sanofi-Synthélabo chose grid computing over a more expensive cluster solution in order to avoid heavy IT costs and depreciation of those dedicated assets while taking advantage of existing resources that will grow into a more powerful solution over time.

"The fact that France's top pharmaceutical company is using United Devices' grid software for virtual screening is a good indication that grid technology is becoming a standard enterprise platform for drug discovery," said United Devices, Chief Executive Officer, Ed Hubbard. "Undertaking a first-of-its kind Virtual Screening System, Sanofi-Synthélabo is also demonstrating their commitment toward progress."

The Enterprise MetaProcessor platform is an on-site grid computing platform that unobtrusively enables clusters, servers, desktops and workstations to act as a processing grid for data-intensive or computationally demanding research and analysis. The platform's architecture offers industry-leading features in security, transparency, reliability and manageability. Organizations can create grids of any scale to accelerate the performance of their business-critical processing in the most cost-effective manner.

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