CIO Award for NUS

-Lo Tien Yin

TEAM SPIRIT has clinched the CIO Award 2006 for NUS. The Award is given by CIO Asia to the top five organisations that demonstrate outstanding vision and genius in implementing strategic IT – not just to meet current business needs but also to transform and create new paradigms for the future. The publication CIO in its feature story on the Award, commended NUS on its collaborative effort: “The concept of Grid computing is difficult to implement, and even harder to do so with good effect. However, NUS has not only gone beyond theory and effective implementation, but has already pushed it to new heights.”

WORK THE GRIDS: Mr Tommy Hor, Director, Computer Centre, received the CIO Award which honoured NUS for its collaborative effort to implement Grid computing. Picture by CIO Asia.

Director of Computer Centre, Mr Tommy Hor said that the trend has changed from giant machines with big power to distributed computing. “With the PC Grid, we are able to harness idle CPU power without having to buy more machines,” he said.

Computers left idle while their users are away, is a common scenario in many organisations. The unused capacity often represents 60 to 80 per cent of their computing resources. Naturally harnessing collective power from these computers during their less active periods – for example after working hours and during weekends – makes a lot of sense. The collective power of a large number of PCs rivals a supercomputer in running certain types of research computation. It reduces costs through improved IT resource utilisation, enhances research quality and enables new research capabilities.

The University’s Computer Centre joined forces with more than 10 departments, faculties and schools to build the largest PC Grid in the region. Some 1,200 PCs are linked up today – enabling a peak computing power of more than 4 TFLOPS (Trillions of Floating-point Operations Per Second) to support large-scale research computation on campus.

Numerous research projects and applications at the University have successfully tapped on Grid resources, resulting in the reduction of computation and processing time. Some have achieved more than 20 times speedup. Others have managed to reduce turnaround time from weeks to days.