The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has provided funding, under its Grants-in-Aid (GIA) Program, to implement the Philippine e-Science Grid (PSiGrid) Program. The three-year program (2008-2011), which aims to establish a grid infrastructure in the Philippines to improve research collaboration among educational and research institutions, both locally and abroad, covers three (3) projects, namely: (1) Boosting Grid Computing Using Reconfigurable Hardware Technology (Grid Infrastructure); (2) Developing a Federated Geospatial Information System (FedGIS) for Hazard Mapping and Assessment; and (3) Boosting Social and Technological Capabilities for Bioinformatics Research (PBS).

The Program will be implemented by the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI), an attached institute of the DOST focusing on R&D in ICT and Microelectronics.

 

 

    Grid computing is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing).

    The Grid is expected to bring together geographically and organizationally dispersed computational resources, such as CPUs, storage systems, communication systems, real-time data sources and instruments, human collaborators. Part of the original motivation for grid computing came from the problems in processing scientific data, where the use of dedicated supercomputers is expensive and frequently infeasible. It will allow scientists worldwide to view and analyze the huge amounts of data flowing from experiments in areas such as high-energy and nuclear physics, gravitational waves, astronomy, and biology (http://www.aei.mpg.de/~manuela/GridWeb/info/grid.html).

    The essence of grid computing lies in the efficient and optimal utilization of a wide range of heterogeneous, loosely coupled resources in an organization tied to sophisticated workload management capabilities or information virtualization (Perspectives on grid: Grid computing -- next-generation distributed computing; http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/grid/library/gr-heritage/).

    The establishment of a computing grid is expected to foster collaboration among local research groups as they share computing resources to further their research efforts. This is also expected to enable efficient utilization of local computing resources.