Need More Computing Oomph? Buy It On-Demand

18 June 2008

Straits Times.com

By: Serene Luo

PLAYERS such as animation producers, financial houses with large amounts of data-crunching, and even educational institutions can soon buy more computing capability on demand.

Three new grid service providers will start selling such high computing capability from the end of the year, based on what is known as grid computing.

Grid computing refers to how numerous computers are coupled up, joining their 'brains' to perform very large tasks which have a lot of data.

This will speed up the calculations, and results can be derived in days, instead of months or years on a single computer.

Known as the Grid Market Hub, this project will ride on the ultra high-speed broadband connectivity that will be rolled out soon, said Information, Communications and The Arts Minister Lee Boon Yang, at the opening of the Infocomm Media Business Exchange (imbX) on Tuesday morning.

Instead of buying and keeping computers in their offices, users will pay per use instead.

They will be able to make use of computing power of over 2,500 cores to begin with, building up to 3,500 cores by 2011. Costs start at $0.33 per core hour, or $0.48 per GB of data for storage per month.

So far, only the research community has generally been taking advantage of grid computing power here, particularly in the life and physical sciences area.

The public sector will also provide 40 per cent of the demand for grid resources, said an Infocomm Development Authority spokesman.

The three grid service providers are made up of consortiums led by New Media Express, PTC System and Singapore Computer Systems.

Copyright © 2008 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. Co.