Submit your grid ideas
11 June 2003

The National Grid Office and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) announced a competition last week for students to develop applications that make use of grid computing.

The competition, open to students at the institutes of higher learning (IHLs) in Singapore, is sponsored by Sun Microsystems. It is expected to jumpstart the adoption of grid computing locally.

What is a grid ?

A grid is a software infrastructure that provides flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among a dynamic collection of virtual organizations.

While the Internet allows users and organisations to share information and conduct transactions, a grid will allow users to share computing power and storage space.

Singapore is keen to explore the potential of grid computing, with plans to set up a biomedical grid and, later, a national grid where computer resources can be connected via a high speed network and shared for the purposes of education, research and even entertainment.

One of the key purposes of the competition is to familiarise students with the potential of grid computing and to stimulate them to think of how the technology can be used in Singapore.

Associate Professor Francis Lee, chairman of NTU’s Campus Grid community and one of the competition’s co-organisers, said: “Innovative applications are crucial to the success of any emerging technology. We hope the competition will make students come up with applications that will help drive Singapore’s plans to set up a grid infrastructure.”

The competition will accept entries on how grid applications can be applied to a wide range of disciplines. These include nanotechnology, bioinformatics and biomedical sciences, physical sciences, visualisation, graphics and animation, engineering design and grid middleware and grid tools.

Teams have to submit a project title and an extended summary by Aug 15. The date for the final submission of the project is Dec 10.

Prof Lee, however, clarified that students were free to submit applications in any discipline that they wished. “If the students want to develop games that require immense computing power, then so be it.”

[Source: Computer Times, 11 June 03, Wednesday]