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BUSINESS IT
The National Grid Office has taken Singapore's
grid ambitions one more step forward with the awarding of contracts
for providing the grid infrastructure and setting up the National
Grid Operations Centre.
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The National Grid Office (NGO) has contracted Singapore
Computer Systems (SCS) to provide grid infrastructure and
manpower outsourced over the next one year and to set up the
National Grid Operations Centre (NGOC). SCS won the National
Grid Pilot Platform (NGPP) tender early this month where it
will provide manpower and managed services to NGO.
These will cover grid infrastructure,
security and applications porting services and the set up of a
NGOC to provide operations in the area of grid and cluster
computing. NGO has the option to extend the contract for
another year.
NGO's
mission is to facilitate the seamless use of an integrated
cyber infrastructure in a secure, effective and efficient
manner to advance scientific, engineering and biomedical
research and development, with the longer term goal of
transforming the Singapore economy using grid
technologies.
The NGOC
comprises the National Grid Support Unit and the National Grid
Monitoring Unit. SCS has worked with Dell and Intel to provide
the required infrastructure in terms of servers and compiler
tools for the NGOC.
The NGPP, which links the National University of
Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Institute of High
Performance Computing, Bioinformatics Institute, Singapore-MIT
Alliance and SCS via 1GB networks, is powered by more than 60
Intel Itanium processors and 100 Intel Xeon processors. This
is in addition to other types of processors made available by
these institutes.
 "As the
provider of grid computing network and the facilitator of grid
resources, it is critical that the pilot platform is stable,
efficient and secure. This will ensure maximum utilisation by
both the academics and commercial organisations in subsequent
phases of the project," said Dr Cheok Beng Teck (left),
director of NGO.
He
added, "This Pilot Platform will provide the infrastructure
that allows companies and researchers to solve problems beyond
the capacities of their in-house computing resources. The
National Grid will enhance the technological edge of Singapore
and attract more high value R&D investments into
Singapore."
Said Pek
Yew Chai, president and chief executive officer of SCS,
"SCS-LCC (Linux Competency Centre) is collaborating with
research organisations such as the San Diego Supercomputer
Centre on cluster and grid computing technologies. As the
co-developer of the NPACI Rocks cluster toolkit, we are keen
to share our expertise with the local research community.
NPACI stands for the National Partnership for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure. The NPACI Rocks cluster toolkit
is a clustering distribution and toolset
collection.
Meanwhile,
in a separate development, the NGO has appointed StarHub to
provide connectivity services to the National Grid
Project.
To this end,
StarHub will provide high speed Gigabit Ethernet, ATM and
Internet links worth $1.2 million for this project. With the
collaboration, the NGO has accorded StarHub the Platinum
Partner status recently.
The next phase of the National Grid will include
improving the security, quality of service and grid services
on the NGPP as well as extending connectivity to other
institutes of higher learning such as polytechnics, industry,
schools and hospitals.
The National Grid Project is at http://www.ngp.org.sg/, SCS is at http://www.scs.com.sg/ and StarHub is at http://www.starhub.com/.
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