IDL tools are employed by technical professionals solving problems in various industries. Researchers in weather observation, climate modeling and medical imaging have the same needs for accessing remote data and processing data remotely. Distributed engineering teams in industries like aerospace engineering and automotive design would also benefit from a tool like GRIDL. These are just a few examples of potential applications outside of NASA. IDL has customers in these industries with established needs for the type of solution provided by GRIDL. By licensing the software developed under this proposal to the commercial vendor of IDL software, Tech-X Corporation can leverage the industry expertise to make these tools available to their existing customers and to potentially attract new customers by making these established technologies better suited to emerging paradigms such as Grid environments. GRIDL enables astronomical researchers to use the IDL tools to which they are accustomed within the emerging standard for remote, distributed computing. NASA projects provide collaborators from various, distributed research organizations with remote access to a tremendous amount of data. Grid computing is becoming the widely accepted paradigm for such distributed collaborations. For example, researchers participating in the US National Virtual Observatory would benefit by having their data and tools available within a standardized environment. Other projects, such Deep Impact and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are examples of projects providing data to a network of researchers around the world. Once these tools are developed, Tech-X Corporation will license them to ITT Visual Information Solutions providing IDL. Consulting work would likely also be a part of the commercial endeavor.
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