South-East Asia (SEA) is set to embrace grid computing in a big way according to the latest Grid Index Report from Oracle. The goal of this report is to monitor interest and activity in the adoption of technologies that will ultimately lead to grid computing.

AP AC has the fastest growth

SEA most bullish on GRID adoption

Grid computing utilises the unused processing cycles of all computers in a network for processing and solving problems too intensive for any stand-alone machine. It applies the available resources of all the computers in a network at the same time to a single problem that usually requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.

This year's Grid Index sampled 1,466 companies globally with 566 of them in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.

Although SEA is lagging behind the United States (US) and Europe in readiness and adoption of grid technologies, it is fast catching up as a region. SEA companies are the most bullish in the world in grid implementations and also rank among the top three globally in knowledge and interest as well as foundation-readiness for grid computing.

All of this bodes well for Singapore, where a number of initiatives look to spur grid adoption even further.

In fact, Singapore is ahead of trends in SEA with more than 60% of organisations polled in Singapore having implemented or are likely to implement grid computing, compared to their peers in SEA.

SEA ranks in top 3 for knowledge and interest

In Singapore, The National Grid initiative is more than three years old. The mission of the National Grid is to contribute towards Singapore's economic and technological competitiveness by creating a collaborative environment for the sharing of computing and other information technology resources in a secure, reliable and efficient manner for education, business, entertainment, R&D and national security purposes.

IT professionals who design, build and manage sophisticated enterprise grid infrastructure now have the opportunity for professional certification thanks to the Enterprise Grid Architect Certification Programme that was launched by Oracle and the Singapore Management University (SMU) in May 2006.