July 2, Diliman, Quezon City - ASTI launched the Philippine e-Science Grid or PSciGrid. PSciGrid is the Philippines' first national e-science grid infrastructure. E-Infrastructures allow distributed computing, data, and storage resources to be shared among users from remote locations. These use high speed networks called Research and Education Networks (RENs), and are intended mainly to support research and education, or scientific investigations such as studies on climate change and drug discovery.

The PSciGrid is comprised of the combined computing resources of ASTI, UP Computational Science Research Center (UP-CSRC), and Ateneo de Manila University School of Science and Engineering (AdMU-SoSE), with the total combined power of 33 compute nodes with an equivalent capacity of 200 CPUs; 12.5 terabytes of disk space; and 509 gigabytes of memory.

Grace Dy Jongco, Project Leader of the Grid-Infra Project, says of this milestone, "It's important for the Philippines to have a national grid initiative because our S&T community needs to have a concerted effort towards fully harnessing ICT infrastructures for the benefit of our local research and development, and essentially, so that our researchers will be able to participate in cutting-edge collaborative scientific research that aims to solve global problems."

Mr. Denis Villorente, ASTI Director, spoke about the circumstances that led to the conceptualization of PSciGrid, "Prior to the PSciGrid Program, the Philippines had yet to push for a national Grid initiative. ASTI, being the DOST's RDI in ICT and Microelectronics, and having established PREGINET, took this as a challenge to set up a national Grid infrastructure." He further said, "We saw a need to promote grid services to our local scientific community who can benefit from this technology, and encourage our local researchers and scientists to have more research collaboration with their counterparts abroad."

In his keynote message (read by Mr. Villorente), Usec. Yumul stressed the importance of collaboration in scientific R&D. He emphasized the three aspects of collaboration -- technology, people, and resources. He said "Technologies make it possible for us to undertake cross-regional and cross-institutional cooperation. With technology, people are able to share knowledge and expertise virtually, as well as combining resources to make things happen. Resource-sharing enables the optimization of individual resources that are connected together in a single network."

During the launching event, the PSciGrid team provided demos of different applications running on PSciGrid, including an application for earthquake simulation, SPECFEM3D Globe, which is targeted to be used by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS). Another application that was demonstrated was AutoDock Vina, which is used for drug discovery, molecular docking and virtual screening. The launch also showcased ASTI's new Stereoscopic 3D Visualization Facility that brings scientific visualization, such as molecular interaction, into a whole new level.