TNGC firms up plan for industry push

The Thai National Grid Centre (TNGC) is pushing for the adoption of grid technology in the commercial sector, starting with the animation industry.

The centre is negotiating with the Thailand Animation and Computer Graphics Association and Bangkok ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics to promote grid computing in the animation and computer-graphic sector. An animation grid would boost 3D animation rendering in Thailand.

The TNGC, a national project funded by the Software Industry Promotion Agency, has tied up with Siam University and some of the country's leading animation companies for the project.

Under the project, the TNGC will provide grid-computing facilities and the necessary software and technical inputs, while Siam University will build the grid portal for animation and computer-graphic clusters.

The centre is also developing an open-source project hosted at SourceForge called AnimaGrid.

It will use Web services and existing cluster and grid schedulers to distribute jobs through commercial-grade renderer software like Autodesk Maya or Blender.

The centre is working on promoting the use of grid computing in the business sector, said TNGC director Putchong Uthayopas.

Until now, the TNGC has focused on the greater use of applications, such as BioGrid, NanoGrid, Drug-Design Grid, Collaborative Grid, Computational-Fluid-Dynamics (CFD) Grid and Animation Grid for educational and research purposes.

In the two years since it was set up, the centre has carried out a number of grid-computing pilots in areas of research and education.

The centre is part of a project to develop a virtual research centre through grid computing. The project is aimed at enabling greater research collaboration between organisations and educational institutes. For example, researchers can use the CFD grid to use software, such as Fluent, at the cluster level and even collaborate with Microsoft to use the Windows high-performance computing cluster.

Business concerns can use the grid to use virtual clusters in a secured cluster environment. A proof-of-concept platform is being developed for the application.

The centre has tied up with the Computational Nanoscience Consortium and Accelrys Software to provide a platform for nanotechnology simulation under the NanoGrid project.

Apart from promoting the adoption of grid computing through the projects, the TNGC is also helping develop a talent pool of grid developers and administrators. It has designed three training modules on basic grid computing, administration and development.

The centre has trained 800 people so far and is seeking to extend training to both graduates and undergraduates.

"We plan to get the training modules included in the curricula of five or six universities, with each university teaching the modules to 1,000-2,000 students. If all works out as planned, we can surpass our neighbours in terms of human-resource pools in the field," Putchong said.

The centre is now working on three more training modules: introduction to grid computing, intermediate grid computing and grid computing for enterprises.

TNGC plans to enrol 2,000 students into the programme and train them by the end of the year.