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Education IT, Government Cloud

Singapore university and IBM cooperate on cloud

By Xinghui Guo | 6 June 2011

The Singapore Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and IBM have embarked on a project to host the university’s High Performance Computing (HPC) environment on a cloud. The project will allow students and researchers greater accessibility, flexibility and speed leverage the HPC environment, said Professor Soh Yeng Chai, Associate Dean of College of Engineering, NTU.

Soh explained that with HPC, users may be limited to a single fixed set of environment and will have to adapt to it. Whereas with HPC on cloud, users can have the “flexibility to provision any types of HPC environment (that) they need quickly”.

According to Son Huynh, Cloud Solutions Executive, Worldwide Industry Cloud Solutions, IBM Cloud Labs, the cooperation just entered its production pilot phase in March 2011 and is expected to be completed by December 2011. NTU will then perform several months worth of “extensive acceptance tests” before full scale production. The entire pilot phase is expected to be completed in March 2012.

Huynh said: “The production pilot approach was chosen to minimise the risk for both NTU and IBM by dividing the overall implementation into several phases, specific milestones and well-defined deliverables.”

IBM and NTU have together formed a steering committee on both technical and business management to provide direction, guidance and approval throughout the whole project.

According to Soh, the platform will also provide a self-service interface for users and automated provisioning in HPC environment leveraging existing virtualisation. Researchers and students who first get to use this HPC-as-a-Service platform will be from NTU’s School of Art, Design and Media, and School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences who work on large-scale rendering, animation, molecular modelling and engineering simulation projects that are “extremely compute and data intensive”.

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