Highlights of Grid08

The second bi-annual GRID08 conference was held on 31st August 2008, at The Leela Palace, Bangalore. GRID08 was a parallel event to the HTC08 conference – an annual event organized by Altair India as part of global HTC series.

GRID08 provided a unique forum for the HPC community attended by invitees across India. Over 75 people attended the event with diverse group of eminent speakers, Client and Partner presentations who gave the audience a deep insight for managing their business and technology challenges, along with a thought provoking panel discussion. The theme for the GRID08 conference was “Grid enablement for Competitive Advantage”

The conference started with a welcome note from Rajesh Chhabra, Director-Enterprise Computing, Altair India, who gave an overview of the evolution of Network computing which brought us into the Grid Computing era and how we are moving towards the Cloud Computing phenomenon

Thillai Raj T. Ramanathan, Vice President – Software Development & Central Engineering, MIMOS, Malaysia, was our first speaker who captured the imagination of the audiences by highlighting practical examples of Grid Computing initiatives that started in Malaysia benefiting the common man including “farmers”. The vision of Malaysian govt. of using the technology to enhance quality of life of a common man was very impressive and few speakers later pointed on how Indian Govt. needs to take similar steps to leverage Grid Computing for masses.

Our second speaker N. Seetha Rama Krishna, Head-HPC Operations, Computational Research Lab who currently enjoys the honors of having the fastest supercomputer in Asia in their lab called EKA, gave an insight in the making of EKA which was the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world when launched (Nov2007) and currently holding the no.8 position (June08). He also explained about its innovative design that produced this worldclass supercomputer in India. He mentioned the need of bringing supercomputing to schools as the industry faces acute shortage of skilled workers in this domain.

Dr. Reza Rooholamini, Director of Enterprise Solutions, Dell Product Group, our Platinum partner of the event gave an extremely impressive talk about the strategies of DELL to gain market share in the HPC domain. DELL has been known as low cost but highly efficient desktop and server producer and Dr Reza gave insight of how DELL is pursuing the dream of making HPC a commodity.

Sudhir Menon from GemStone our Gold partner of the event added to the impressive variety that was created by the line up of speakers from different domains and sectors. GemStone’s product is known for its high availability data solution in the financial sector. He explained his data grid offering and added the knowledge base of the audiences on the possibilities.

Our next speaker Putchong Uthayopas, Director and Co-founder of the Thai National Grid Center, Bangkok, explained the necessity of taking small steps in the Grid projects for it to be a success. As the technology front of Grid Computing is still evolving, he explained that it is important to be dynamic and have the ability to adapt to the right solution as we learn about them.

Prof. S. Thamarai Selvi, Anna University, Chennai, delivered very energetic presentation with an array of examples of Grid Computing and the projects that are being worked on around the world. She explained her work on the popular topic of Virtualization and also about the patent they have submitted for the work done in this domain in her lab.

Followed by Shajy Thomas, Head of Technology, Crest Animation Studios, gave a brilliant insight of the need of HPC in the animation domain. He highlighted about e-Render- a jointly developed product by Altair and Crest Animation which resulted in savings of 20% every month on their electricity costs alone by utilizing a built in Power aware scheduling feature of PBS Professional™.

Rajendra Kumar Patro, General Manager-Engineering, Infotech Enterprises, delivered a highly insightful presentation on the overall savings to his department by employing e-Compute and PBS Professional™ for managing HPC. He gave a head on head comparison with other competitive products that he used in the past and improved satisfaction in various areas such as reliability, user interface, monitoring etc., by adopting e-Compute solution from Altair.

Faisal M Paul, Country Manager – HPC & Open Source Linux Business, HP, our Platinum sponsor had one of the best tricks under his sleeves to keep the audience interested and attentive by arranging a small quiz for them based on his presentation. He delivered a crisp presentation focusing on the HP’s roadmap for HPC and shared interesting details of EKA at CRL that was delivered by HP in a short span of time in 2007. He gave away three memory sticks to those who answered his quiz questions and in the process he did create a lot of excitement among the participants.

Michael M. Humphrey, Vice President-Partner Programs, Altair Inc. gave a sneak preview on Altair’s Grid computing existing and upcoming products road map.

The speaker sessions concluded with the Panel Discussion which gained very encouraging and enthusiastic participation from the audience. Topics covered during the panel discussion were:

• If Grid Computing has delivered the expected ROI?
• Are we ready for the Cloud computing yet?

All presentations were well received by the attendees and we sincerely thank all our speakers, conference attendees, partners and their organizations for their time and support to yet another success of this conference.