APPLICATIONS

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) has announced the formation of the National Grid Advisory Council (NGAC) to lead enterprises in adopting grid computing. The NGAC, led by Richard Lim, chief executive of the Defence Science and Technology Agency, comprises 14 members who represent the full spectrum of Grid stakeholders -- the users, service providers, academia and government agencies facilitating grid adoption. The comprehensive representation will see the various grid stakeholders contributing their views as Singapore advances its grid development over the next three years. Today, Singapore's enterprises are already catching up on grid technologies. According to the Oracle Grid Index IV report that was released in June 2006, more than 60 percent of organizations polled here have implemented, or are likely to implement grid computing, ahead of Southeast Asia’s score of 50 percent. The IDA is keen for more industries, beyond just the research and development community, to reap the huge IT cost savings and benefits that grid computing promises. Besides establishing the NGAC, as of April 1, Singapore’s National Grid Office (NGO) is now also part of IDA, to better allow IDA, in its role as an industry developer, to spearhead efforts to increase industry adoption of grid computing, starting with key economic sectors such as digital media, life sciences, finance and banking, and manufacturing services. Leong Keng Thai, deputy chief executive/director-general (Telecoms) of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, said, “The grid model promises optimum utilization of IT resources and tremendous cost savings for businesses. We envision a future where grids are for all. No enterprise should be left behind because they cannot afford grid computing. To realize this vision, pay-per-use grids are essential. Computing, storage and software are ideally delivered as services, much like utilities such as water and electricity, so that no one, especially SMEs, need to worry about hefty investments in order to leverage grids.” The IDA is currently in talks with government agencies and industry players such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Oracle, to develop a commercial grid infrastructure that will equip enterprises with on-demand access to grids on a pay-per-use basis. When ready by end year or early 2008, this “National Grid” will place high-performance computing, software-as-a-service and huge storage capabilities in the hands of businesses. The “National Grid’ comes after the success of a trial, the National Grid Pilot Platform (NGPP), that was established in 2003 to provide compute-resources free-of-charge to both the R&D community and businesses. Organizations had contributed their idle compute resources on a goodwill basis to the NGPP. From an initial base of some 250 CPUs in 2003, the NGPP has grown to boast capabilities of nearly 1,000 CPUs today. The “National Grid” will now see a more concerted effort between the public and private sectors to realize on-demand, pay-per-use grids for enterprises, with more robust service-level agreements than that of the NGPP. Building on local efforts, Singapore will also be looking towards international collaborations to help key economic sectors leverage grids. For a start, Singapore will be leading member economies of APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) to collaborate on grid projects that will drive common areas of interest and benefit APEC economies. These projects could include using access grids to enhance distance-learning, harnessing data grids to facilitate the archiving of digital assets, and exploiting PC grids to enable the solving of common computational problems. Speaking of this APEC grid initiative for the first time at Singapore’s annual mega grid conference, GridAsia 2007, Leong said, “We are pleased to continue to play a key part in global Grid efforts. Singapore is the first Southeast Asia node within the Global Operational Grid in 2005, and has contributed compute resources towards global research projects. Today, the APEC grid will allow the region to more efficiently harness our individual ICT capabilities, tap on shared resources, and thus help to strengthen APEC economies’ competitiveness in the global playing field.”