Grid computing is distributed computing over a network of heterogeneous resources using open standards.

The establishment of TNGC is an attempt to lay down the national electronic infrastructure to increase the country's competitiveness in an era of knowledge-based economies.

The four objectives of the project are to increase Thai IT industry competitiveness, to create knowledge workers for the next generation of IT and enterprise computing, to create awareness of the country's IT competitiveness, and to create more business opportunities for the country by using grid technology.

Putchong Uthayopas, TGNC director, said the centre will officially open next month after preparing for a year.

At the centre, at Kasetsart University, are 200 dual processor nodes and 53 terabytes of storage, while another 80 dual processor nodes - totally 160 CPUs - are installed in 14 founding universities.

Included are Kasetsart University, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology North Bangkok, Walailak University in Nakhon Si Thammarat, Suranaree University in Nakhon Ratchasima, the Asia Institute of Technology, Chulalongkorn University, Mahidol University, Chiang Mai University, Silpakorn University, and the Meteorological Department - with five client nodes each. The centre plans to operate the national grid project in three phases from 2007 to 2009.

The first phase, called Pilot Grid, is to build awareness of grid technology amongst a wide range of groups along with encouraging the adoption of grid technology among the early groups who realise that grid computing is crucial infrastructure for research and development.

The second phase, called R&E Grid, will run from 2007 to 2008. It is a time to enlarge the adoption of grid technology to improve research and education institutions. It aims to encourage around 20 to 30 research and education projects using the centre's infrastructure.

"There are four main areas with potential demand for grid technology. They are biotechnology, nanotechnology, chemicals and animation. We have some co-pilot projects using grid technology in these areas," said Putchong.

The last phase called Enterprise Grid will take off in 2009 when the adoption of grid computing has spread to larger groups, especially in enterprise businesses.

In the initial stage, the centre will collaborate with many partners to run trials in the use of grid technology. For instance, virtual screening research is the use of grid technology in research and development for drug discovery, and the Virtual Research Centre is to use grid technology to research the advance forecast environment.

"There are many potential applications, apart from these four areas, which will benefit from using grid technology, such as life sciences, geo-informatics, manufacturing, financial, digital content, and computational fluid dynamics for the automobile industry," said Putchong.

In the long run, this centre's grid-computing infrastructure will offer Thailand the opportunity to provide global outsourcing, once industry realises that grid technology can be used for more complex design and advanced computational tools to improve production quality and to reduce product life cycles.

"This means the technology provides us with grid business opportunities as well," said Putchong.

Grid technology will also strengthen the country in research and development.

This electronic infrastructure will give researchers faster results,  provide more complex research challenges, and bring about a stronger and better-equipped computational research community.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation