Army also needs the power of Grid. Army usually is the largest organization in all countries. Army has lots of branch. General usually wants to command all army under-control just-in-time in face-to-face manner. So Access Grid would fit this requirement perfectly. Many armies have their own high-speed private network channels so they don’t need to care about quality and bandwidth. Army has its own spies and agencies. They produce high-volume of information. These information must be mined to analyze confident, accuracy, and probability. In short, all information must be prioritized and rearranged as fast as possible. Historical is essential here. Data Grid could be used to store images captured by private satellites for further mentioning. Computational Grid also fits in purpose to simulate how to deal with a war correctly. War is just a kind of complex chess.

E-Government means to manage large amount of distributed data in a country and all offices around the world. There are many areas to implement Grid in E-Government sector.

• Distributed database - Since there are so many private information of all populations, it would be better to store data of each people at the branch office where they belong to. By using this approach, the main office will not be overloaded by querying during high traffic condition.

E-Commerce, including enterprise computing, need Grid technology to fulfill their requirements. First of all, let us start from traditional high-performance computing needs in business sector. Actually, businesses do need high-performance computing. Unfortunately, almost businesses in Thailand have been absolutely believed in expertises. What does it mean? I’m talking about large-scale decision support system. There are so many decision support algorithm to predict the future markets based on historical and statistical analysis theories. You might argue that it’s not that large and a high-end computer could fit the job. Well, to accurately predict the future, you have to consider lots of variables. The system with a few variables may be done in a short time but you must not underestimate the realistic problems.

Grid is becoming more popular in last recent years. What can we do with this technology? Below is just a short list to help you answer this question easier.

• E-Commerce
• E-Government
• E-Military
• E-Healthcare
• E-Entertainment
• E-Learning

I will explain in more detail in separate posts.

Have you ever heard about High-Performance Computing or HPC, for short? Generally, HPC is a kind of technology that lets applications run faster. You might argue that today processors are so fast and you don’t need HPC. True and false. Single processor is not as fast as ones want it to be. Let me give you some example. Assuming you want to play a 2-player game, e.g., chess, and you want to win this game. How to win this game? It’s very easy to win any games. You have to do something that your opponent will have lowest chance to win the game. If you don’t have a computer, you must predict possible steps on your own. Actually, nobody predicts in action. They just believe in their experiences. If you play the game for so long, you will remember some patterns. Computer could help you a lot to simulate all possible playing to find the best solution for current state. Well, single processor or a few processors are not enough in most cases. For example, to play a chess game, you have 16 pieces on the board and your opponent has another 16 pieces. So you have to simulate 16^10 = 1,099,511,627,776 cases to find the best move for just 10 steps ahead. Suppose that your computer could simulate 10,000,000 cases in just a second. That means you could finish this simulation in 30 hours. Your opponent will never wait for that long. However, if you have 256 processors, it would take only 7 minutes.

This year is a big year for grid computing. After so long waiting more than 2 years, grid technology has been commercialized successfully and all of us could see significant impacts in a few months. I have just seen 2 interesting press news.

• Crosswalk launches iGrid Storage System