One new project is a digital media virtual grid community, to be launched early next year. Rendering software will be made available on the NG to enable digital media enthusiasts to convert two-dimensional animation into 3D.

The national grid has enormous computing resources - about 750 gigaflops to be exact, which is equivalent to the combined power of 625 Pentium 4, 3GHz PCs. The high speed cyber-infrastructure links data, computers, sensors and other software resources into a single virtual laboratory, enabling flexible, controlled resource sharing across the network.

While the Internet allows users to share information and conduct transactions, a grid allows the sharing of computing power and storage space.

Given these kind of resources, Singapore's academic community has welcomed the NG project. Associate Professor Francis Lee Bu Sing of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) said: '2004 will witness more and more grid computing applications and projects going online.' Prof Lee is chairman of NTU's campus grid.

One new grid project NTU is working on is a collaboration with top scientists in England on a topic known as 'distributed simulation'. The project is one of only four grid collaborations approved by the British government's e-Science programme. It involves scientists performing computer simulations of various business scenarios, such as supply chain processes, and studying how changing some factors will impact issues like profitability and time to market.

While projects are set to take off, there are several policy and governance issues with regard to grid computing that the National Grid Office is still 'mulling over', said Dr Cheok.

The policies will be decided by the national grid governance council, comprising members of all seven stakeholder organisations, and chaired by Dr Cheok. The council was set up in November. Its first meeting is likely to be in January. The stakeholders are the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, the Infocomm Development Authority, the Singapore-MIT Alliance, the Defence Science and Technology Agency and the Economic Development Board.

First drafts of a code of conduct and security and resource sharing policies that the governance council will work on should be out by the March next year, said Dr Cheok.

Prime among these is the development of a security policy and framework to ensure that when computing resources are shared on the NG, the resource owners are reasonably assured that their systems are not vulnerable to attacks and abuse.

'If the IT-security is too strict, then users may have problems accessing the resources. Hence, it would be a challenge to find a framework that strikes a balance between security and accessability.'

Another challenge is developing a code of conduct for users in such a way that it prevents them from unwittingly abusing the privileges of using the NG.

The governance council will also have to come up with a 'Computer Resource Unit' for trading of computing resources over the NG. The NG is currently an amalgamation of a wide range of heterogeneous hardware.

Said Dr Cheok: 'The CPU types are different. Some processors are 32 bits, others are 64 bits. So how do you share or trade such heterogeneous resources?'

In addition, there is the issue of memory and hard-disk usage. If one user, for instance, consumes very little processing power but a lot of memory, how would his usage compare to another who uses a lot of processing power but very little memory

'Currently, the users are sharing resources based on goodwill, but it's clear that in the long run, policies will have to be in place,' he said.

One of the biggest benefits of grid computing is that it allows for collaborative work involving scientists and researchers located at opposite ends of the globe. One such collaboration is already under way between the Institute for High Performance Computing (IHPC) and Rolls-Royce in England. The project is part of the 10 pilot initiatives undertaken on the National Grid (NG).

Rolls-Royce scientists in England are using high-end servers at the IHPC in Singapore to perform simulations of huge aircraft turbine engines. The work involves scientists in England who remotely execute the simulation, which is then viewed by scientists in Singapore, England and elsewhere using a remote visualisation capability enabled by the grid. Simulation work done so far has taken up computing power equivalent to 64 CPUs, said Dr Terence Hung, programme manager of software and computing at IHPC. Jobs to be done in the new year may consume the computing power of 128 CPUs, Dr Hung added.

IHPC is also developing a grid-enabled portal so that simulation and visualisation activities can take place even more seamlessly over the grid.

In a separate project which will go full steam next year, scientists will use computer simulations to study how to significantly improve the prediction, scheduling and performance of aircraft engine maintenance.

Click on the thumbnail above for a full size view

The above shows how Rolls-Royce (RR) plans to use grid computing for collaborative research.

Users - RR engineers or partners - will first access the grid infrastructure through a web-based grid portal, where they will submit 'jobs' or tasks that they expect the grid resources to execute.

The jobs involve complex simulation of how aircraft turbine engines will behave under different circumstances, such as changes in air pressure or velocity of the craft.

Grid tools will help to farm out the jobs to appropriate resources, at geographically disparate locations. The resources can be at IHPC in Singapore, at Rolls-Royce laboratories in England or at the computer centres of RR partners in England and elsewhere. The different resources work on different aspects of a single job.

Once the simulation is completed, the grid software will help consolidate the simulation data from the various resources and convert it into a format that is easily readable and accessible to all parties involved. The results can be viewed from the same grid portal where the job was first submitted.