Guest of Honour Speech at the Official Launch of the National Grid Pilot Platform

1 November 2003

SPEECH BY GEORGE YEO, MINISTER FOR TRADE AND INDUSTRY, AT THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE NATIONAL GRID PILOT PLATFORM ON 1 NOV 2003 AT 9.30 AM

Distinguished Guests

Ladies and Gentlemen

Introduction

We are here today to launch the National Grid Pilot Platform, Singapore's first national project on grid computing.

This is a project which requires the government and the private sector to work together closely, at least in the initial phases. It will greatly increase the overall computational capability in. Until it is clearer how the benefits of national grid computing can be captured by market players, it is right that part of the initial investment should be provided by the public sector. But there is little doubt that the increase in supply of computational capability will eventually be gobbled up.

Our approach is to build this IT infrastructure as an economic asset which will enhance our future competitiveness. We took a similar approach some years ago when we wired up all households in Singapore for broadband. In the same way as the energy grid provides easy access to power for the industrial economy, the IT grid will one day provide easy access to computational resources for the knowledge economy.

The scientific community has recognised this potential for some time now and been very enthusiastic about developing grid computing. Grid computing will link computers, sensors and other IT resources into a single virtual pool or market which can be shared by geographically dispersed users. In this way, the whole becomes much more than the sum of the parts. Grid computing will change the way people collaborate and use computer resources.

The business model for grid computing is however still unclear. Private money is understandably cautious and unwilling to finance the infrastructure which is needed. However we should not wait for the market to develop, hence our decision to treat grid computing as a national project. But we must, at the same time, recognise that market uncertainty about the precise shape of grid computing is a true reflection of our state of knowledge today.

The National Grid Pilot Platform

The National Grid Office has been established to help steer Singapore towards a grid-enabled economy. Our broad objective is a grid which allows suppliers and users, public and private, to plug into a high-speed network easily and securely. We must progressively allow market forces to allocate resources and incentivize innovation in the grid. This has to be done in a gradual and experimental way.

The National Grid Pilot Platform is the first step in our journey to develop this new cyber-infrastructure for Singapore. For the first stage of the Pilot Platform project, the partners have made available about 750 Giga FLOPS (FLoating point Operations per Second) of heterogeneous computing resources for sharing. In addition, the network infrastructure provided by this Pilot Platform is able to link up computing resources amounting to about 3 Tera FLOPS (or 3 trillion FLOPS) currently available in A*STAR's research institutes, NUS and NTU. This is 3 times the computational power of the single biggest computer server currently available in Singapore and will enable us to run massively computational programmes.

Specifically, the Pilot Platform will help our researchers, ICT companies and industrial partners in the following ways:

a. First, researchers can use the infrastructure to develop large-scale applications. They will no longer need to limit the size of the problems to the amount of in-house computational resources they have. For example, the availability of computing resources over the Pilot Platform will help biomedical companies to set up "dry" laboratories in Singapore and manufacturers to use computer-assisted engineering for the design and manufacture of complex components.

b. Second, the grid infrastructure will allow on-demand, dynamic allocation of resources which will eventually result in higher returns to investment. We also hope that the sharing of computational resources will lead to new patterns of research collaboration. The Pilot Platform will support the disaster recovery plans of participating organisations by providing a more resilient distributed computing architecture. In this way, the Pilot Platform provides a certain amount of group insurance.

c. The Pilot will also provide a test-bed for ICT companies to try out new gridrelated products and services. The protection of valuable intellectual property and confidential information will be particularly important.

d. Finally, the Pilot Platform enables us to test out policies for the efficient regulation of the grid. Policies will have to be adjusted as technology and the market evolve. Investors and users must trust that the grid is safe to use and reliable. We have also to overcome a natural psychological fear of sharing private resources. Like electricity and telecoms, large parts of the grid will eventually be market-driven while core components will remain tightly-controlled.

Already at this early stage, the Pilot Platform has attracted considerable interest from industry players. For example, in aerospace, BAE Systems and other UK research institutions are working with IHPC (Institute of High Performance Computing) to develop grid-enabled computational tools for the solution of very complex problems. As part of this project, super-computing resources in Singapore and the UK will be linked to model and simulate the electromagnetic behaviour of complex aircraft systems using grid technology.

ST Engineering is working with IBM and IHPC on a test-bed to demonstrate the feasibility of grid computing for its far-flung engineering and design units.

Rolls-Royce is working with IHPC and several research institutions in UK in two areas of grid computing. The first involves the use of grid computing for the engineering simulation of large aircraft turbine engines and the second involves the use of grid computing and artificial intelligence for the prediction of engine failure and the scheduling of maintenance.

In the biomedical arena, the Bioinformatics Institute (BII) has formed a partnership with UC San Diego and San Diego Supercomputing Centre to develop an "Encyclopedia of Life". Using grid computing, they hope to compile a database of all the proteomes in existence. This database will help scientists to carry out the 3D modeling of all proteins and determine their biological functions.

The National Grid Office will announce details of its Industry Partnership program next year so that more companies can participate in the Pilot Platform. We hope that the increase in demand will have a snowballing effect. We will learn and improve as we go along so that the Pilot Platform can quickly become a full-fledged cyber-infrastructure for Singapore.

We are awarding partnership status to the following ICT companies today: CISCO, StarHub, SCS, Dell, HP, IBM and Sun. These partners have committed resources such as hardware, software and manpower services to the Pilot Platform. I would like to thank them for their contributions. They have not only helped to reduce greatly the cost of installing and operating the Pilot Platform, their contributions are also proof of their commitment to the success of this exciting enterprise. We hope other ICT companies will also join as partners once they see the potential advantages.

Conclusion

Our objective is not just to develop the grid in Singapore. It is also to make Singapore a key node in what we see to be a future worldwide grid. This will complement all our other efforts to make Singapore a global entrepolis for the knowledge economy.

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