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HiPERiSM Consulting, LLC, (Durham, North Carolina) and AS1MET Services (Blanco, Texas), operating together as the HiCLAS1 joint venture, have announced the availability of AERMOD-HPCS, a High Performance Computing (HPC), single threaded, version of the American Meteorological Society / U.S. EPA Regulatory Model, AERMOD. The current release is for the Microsoft Windows Operating System, with a version for Linux planned for later in the year once quality assurance testing is completed. As of December 2006, AERMOD became the preferred model for regulatory use for transport distances less than 50 kilometers. AERMOD is now in widespread use, but suffers from computational inefficiencies in performance with the U.S. EPA release for commodity platforms. It is in response to this circumstance that HiCLAS1 offers AERMOD-HPCS. This new version has been demonstrated to execute as much as 2 to 3 times faster than the U.S. EPA release for the same data (for details see HPC-2007-1). The causes of performance limitations in the U.S. EPA version of AERMOD code have been identified and restructured by HiCLAS1 through proprietary performance enhancements to better match commodity architectures. Most importantly, all of this code restructuring was done without modifying any of the underlying science. Thus AERMOD-HPCS is simply a computationally-enhanced version of AERMOD. George Delic, Ph.D., CEO of HiPERiSM Consulting, LLC, said that “with this release of v1.8 we have taken the first step up the performance curve for AERMOD. But we are already at work on the next steps. So end-users of AERMOD should expect further performance enhancements in the near-term for AERMOD-HPCS". Arney Srackangast, founder of AS1MET Services, said, “AERMOD-HPCS offers the air dispersion modeling community profound improvement over what is currently available from AERMOD, regardless of what hardware you currently possess or are planning to purchase.” Technical reports published on the QA reports pages at this site provide some insights as to why AERMOD-HPCS is faster than the EPA release. The results of workload through-put with concurrent executions reported there (HPC-2007-3) show superior performance results with AERMOD-HPCS when compared to the U.S. EPA version. The latest report (HPC-2007-4) addresses the question "Why is AERMOD-HPCS faster than the EPA distribution?" These reports will be updated regularly to bring information on Windows and Linux platform performance, and quality assurance issues. Since none of the performance enhancement work so far performed by HiCLAS1 has been sponsored by any government agency, the cost-recovery model is to charge a license fee for AERMOD-HPCS and offer an optional Support Service Renewal (SSR) subscription as described on the sales page at this site. Organizations (or individuals) interested in purchasing the AERMOD-HPCS product may also send Email directly to sales@hiclas1.com. Obtaining the product is a simple two-step process * Download the aermodhpcs-installer package from the downloads page at its Web site, and * Execute the license extractor application once a license is received from HiCLAS1. The AERMOD-HPCS product uses the Reprise License Manager (www.reprisesoftware.com) and three basic license types are available: * Evaluation license: a node-locked, time limited, single user license, * Node-locked license: a license specific to one platform, and * Network license: a license that will "float" across a network for use on any computer on the same network. Both the node-locked, and network licenses, come with a "quantity" option where the "quantity" is the count of the required number of concurrent users. Thus, for a single user this is a count of one, whereas for a cluster farm count is as large a number as the customer requires. All licenses, other than the evaluation license are perpetual, however, updates are only available to those with an active SSR subscription. AS1MET Services and HiPERiSM Consulting, LLC, look forward to developing their relationship with the AERMOD user community and welcome their feed-back and suggestions on products and services.