ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

Today sees the launch of a new UK-wide grid computing competition. Aimed at students and young professionals, it hopes to develop solutions to 21st century challenges – using, as the name suggests, the capabilities of grid computing technologies.

It’s being launched by Grid Computing Now! (the DTI’s Knowledge Transfer Network for grid computing) in partnership with the British Computer Society (BCS). I see The Guardian – which has being showing a healthy interest in the topic of grid – has already blogged the competition.

But I’ll put my hand up before I go any further and confess a self-interest: I sit on the Grid Computing Now! Advisory Council, and will also be a judge on this competition, alongside a panel of distinguished fellow judges drawn from the Department of Trade and Industry, University of Southampton, UCL (University College London), Intel, and Oxford University.

I’ve been a keen supporter of this initiative ever since it was first floated as an idea – to the extent that Microsoft is contributing a mix of prizes, such as our high performance computing offering (Compute Cluster Server) and the opportunity to attend the Microsoft European Research and Innovation Day in Brussels. Oh, and did I mention an Xbox 360?

When I was authoring our response to the Transformational Government strategy, I flagged grid computing as a key element for inclusion in the next generation of government architectures:

"Alongside the move to 64-bit computing, another major industry trend highly relevant to the Transformational Government agenda is the move of high performance computing from academia and research into the mainstream.

There are potentially important implications in how public sector organisations think about architecting their services in the future and how common infrastructure will be shared across the sector, potentially crossing inter-agency and inter-departmental boundaries. For example, HPC and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) could play a key role in rationalising data centres and the architectural models used for government systems."

I’m really looking forward to seeing some breakthrough innovations here and would encourage students and young professionals to be as imaginative as they can be. Grid is moving out of the labs and into the mainstream. The UK, with its great record in computer science, has the opportunity to capitalise upon this - benefitting from a whole new generation of innovation and enterprise with grid at its core.

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