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Grid system wins CIO Award 2006: A spirit of sharing A powerful grid system that connects over a thousand PCs on campus and harnesses idle CPU power to reach an unprecedented amount of computational power has received its due accolade. The Computer Centre's Tera-scale Campus Grid, TCG@NUS, is one out of just five recipients of the CIO Award 2006. TCG@NUS beat over 100 nominations from the public and private sectors to bag the award. And when Computer Centre Director, Mr Tommy Hor, received it, he conveyed one key message: it is the collective effort across faculties in contributing to the Grid that gave NUS the edge over the competition. "It is a true spirit of sharing with no boundary," says Mr Hor. Sharing without boundaries Previously, there was no way to make use of the idle compute cycles of the massive number of PCs across campus when they were lightly loaded. TCG@NUS puts NUS's computing power at the fingertips of the NUS research community, ready to be harnessed. This, however, was made possible only through the spirit of sharing. More than 10 NUS departments have contributed about 1200 PCs so far to join the Grid, says Mrs Tan Chee Kiow, Computer Centre Deputy Director. "Contributions came even from departments and individuals such as NUS Libraries that have no research computing needs, demonstrating great community spirit," Mrs Tan adds. How the Tera-scale Campus Grid works The TCG started harnessing idle CPU cycles on campus in January 2005. Starting out with just 150 PCs, it crossed the 1000-PC mark by September that year. In effect, the PCs work together like a large virtual computer that researchers can access at any time to perform large-scale research computation. The TCG's uniqueness lies in its ability to deliver unprecedented levels of enormous computing power, without the drain of a large and expensive system, says Tan Chee Chiang, Computer Centre Manager, SVU/Academic Computing. Its collective power rivals that of a supercomputer, greatly enhancing research capabilities and opening up new areas of discovery in shorter time frames than before. (Click here for more details on the Grid's computing power.) The dynamic and flexible TCG also scales up easily, integrating thousands of PCs on campus and pushing the computation limit, further raising the quality of research at NUS. Its return on investment is just as impressive. The investment of about $300,000 allows NUS to benefit from a total grid capacity of 12 TFLOPS (Trillions of Floating Points per Second) when it reaches the targeted size of 3000 nodes. In contrast, reaping the same benefits on a typical dedicated cluster would require about $3 million to $4 million in investment. "TCG@NUS enables us to accelerate today's grand-scale research, accomplishing research milestones, benefiting humanity, and opening up new areas of discovery and analysis in time frames previously impossible," says Deputy Director Mrs Tan. "This is of paramount significance to achieving research excellence of the University," she adds. Freedom to expand TCG@NUS is just the next step in the NUS strategy to becoming a global campus. The Grid brings with it the freedom to expand the NUS IT infrastructure, generating new capabilities without the need to add new hardware. Furthermore, the CIO Award 2006 win has brought with it high expectations. This new benchmark for the future development of the Grid computing infrastructure will only spur on the inextinguishable NUS spirit of excellence. And our rapidly developing Grid computing infrastructure will play a crucial part in keeping NUS ready at all times to reach even greater levels of collaboration and sharing - spanning physical distance and crossing boundaries, departments, campuses and countries. |