Gray Rock Professional Alliance, LLC and its staff provide custom software solutions, including requirements, analysis, architecture, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. Our scientific, mathematical, and business process expertise allows us to comprehend and contribute to the entire problem to be solved. We consequently are able to adopt a system approach to our client's software needs, while allowing the formality and documentation of the process to be driven by the client (ranging, e.g., from the full UML modeling process to extreme programming).
For the software portion of the solution we recommend the use of OO techniques and patterns using modeling/documentation tools such as Rational Rose, configuration management tools such as Rational Clearcase, and IDEs such as JBuilder or Visual Studio. In some cases, however, the usual tools are not appropriate and we are fully capable of rapidly developing and documenting medium-scale systems with little more than a text editor and compiler. Even in these cases we maintain our attention to architectural detail and documentation.
Our staff includes individuals having over 5 years experience in development under various Windows operating systems (principally Windows NT and Windows 2000), and over 15 years experience in development under Unix, including SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, and Linux.
Our staff also has experience developing solutions to be implemented on high-performance computing equipment, including massive SMP machines and clusters. Gray Rock Professional Alliance recommends Java or C++ for new development, and has Sun-certified Java experts and C++ experts with over 5 years of experience. We also have experience integrating custom applications with third-party database products using e.g. JDBC or ODBC. Legacy systems or special needs are serviced by our staff with expertise in Visual Basic, Perl, C and Ada, and we can support conversion or maintenance in a variety of other languages as well (e.g., FORTRAN).
Gray Rock Professional Alliance, LLC can design custom hardware solutions to support high performance computing requirements. We have designed and developed cluster solutions using commodity hardware and the Linux operating system to act as the computation platform for large-scale signal processing problems. We are able to balance considerations of throughput and latency when designing such systems. We support all phases of cluster design and implementation, including networking, hardware selection and configuration, O/S selection and configuration, system administration, maintenance, and communications. Inter-module communications can be handled by open standards such as PVM or MPI, or using custom message passing designs, as appropriate to meet the client needs.
We have expertise using most modern networking standards that are appropriate to high-performance computing, including Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, ATM/Frame Relay, and proprietary specialized networks such as Miranet and Dolphin. Our staff is experienced with issues associated with HPC over long geographic distances, including interfacing with the Telco industries to arrange dedicated or shared WAN connectivity, and implementing secure communications over public lines.
Gray Rock Professional Alliance, LLC, employs experienced Ph.D. scientists and other highly qualified engineering and technical staff with at least 10 years of experience. Collectively, our staff has formal training and experienced expertise in a wide-ranging variety of disciplines, including: dynamical systems, statistical analysis, signal processing, image processing, pattern recognition, functional analysis, radar systems, electrical engineering, transform theory, radiometry, and geodesy.
Our scientists are accomplished publishers in the open literature, including such peer-reviewed publications as IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, and The Journal of Forensic Sciences. We can perform studies and original or derivative analyses in any of our areas of expertise, and prepare the results for any type of dissemination from an internal report to a reviewed publication. Format and forum for results are always determined by the client.
The Gray Rock Professional Alliance has expertise leveraging our scientific, engineering, mathematical, and business process knowledge into modeling problems and systems of interest to our clients. Our models are designed to respond to specific client needs or classes of questions, and can be either predictive or prescriptive in nature. We also have the required software expertise to implement models as programs or simulations, as appropriate, including formal designs and documentation if desired. These software implementations provide clients with tools they can use to explore their needs and develop new insights.