Atlas2 runs on many different computing platforms, from the standard desktop computer to highly scaled implementation with multimode computational clusters.
Hardcore Mac users are notorious for "thinking differently" than PC users, and expect a different computing experience.
The reason is that the communication cost between different computing nodes dominates small datasets, while the computation cost dominates large datasets.
Computational chemistry data in various formats from different computing sources, software packages, and users can be parsed into uniform metadata for storage in a MySQL database.
SilverStream, based in Billerica, Mass., makes software that permits different computing systems to interact online.
Merrill Lynch, Mr. Birnbaum said, has very different computing requirements from an Internet company.
Six months ago, though, he did buy an iPad because, he says, it provides a different computing experience.
Many Web sites have raced to convert their video files from Flash to HTML5, a different computing standard.
Rather than having tiled arrays of identical processors, the microprocessor of the future will include many different computing cores, each built to solve a specific type of problem.
(On the bright side, Longhorn will contain advances in rendering images and enabling different computing platforms to exchange data directly between applications).
Apple is creating a similar look and feel for the two operating systems to create a sense of familiarity among its different computing platforms, which could make customers more loyal to the brand, Mr. Gartenberg said.
