Session: Commercial GSPs
"The Infrastructure Behind GSP "
Speaker: Tang Chok Siing Head, Technology Innovation Centre (Singapore Computer Systems Ltd)
Abstract
The presentation will share on the considerations, issues and challenges of setting up GSPs to address both HPC grid and enterprise grid.
Biodata
 Tang Chok Siing is Head of Technology Innovation Centre at Singapore Computer Systems. He provides constant market scan for new innovative products that Business Units (Bus) can leverage in their offerings to the customers. He also provides technical review to improve/minimise solution gaps and to reduce technical risks. Besides, he also serves as the Competency Master for solution architect. He is currently working with BUs and Business Excellence to introduce tools to improve the quality of development. Previously, he leads the Chief Architect Office which provides solutioning, prototyping services, architectural and design review.
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"Pay As You Use Computing - nGrid"
Speaker: Alan Woo Shian Loong Chief Technology Officer (NewMedia Express Pte Ltd)
Abstract
Are you currently paying for the compute resources 24x7 no matter you use it or not? Most servers sitting in the data center now are mostly under utilized, with average 20-30% utilization. A lot of hardware resource, energy, data center space is wasted due to the low utilization rate. Utility based computing provides a convenient, all-in-one package of compute resource, storage capacity, software and Internet connectivity that can be paid only whenever you use it. Enterprise can now buy computing resource on demand without worrying about hardware, software licensing and bandwidth. SaaS provider can now deploy high availability and high scalability applications by leveraging on the Grid infrastructure.
Biodata
 Alan Woo is CTO and co-founder of NewMedia Express where he has spent several years in enabling local SME web presence. Alan have struck strategic partnerships with software/hardware vendor, data center operators and ISPs in various collaboration programs such as Fujitsu Asia (iLIUP), Microsoft (SPLA), 1-Net Singapore (Media Streaming) and Starhub (Velocity Program). His most recent achievement is leading the nGrid consortium for Call-for-Collaboration on grid service provisioning with the National Grid Office. Alan holds a degree in Computing & Information Systems from University of Oxford Brookes. He possesses extensive experience in Internet Architecture, Ecommerce, Mobile Media, Broadcast, Data Center Consolidation and Managed Services.
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"Pay Per Use Storage"
Speaker: S S Lim Managing Director (PTC System (S) Pte Ltd)
Abstract
Is Storage as a Service (SaaS) a working model for businesses? Should enterprise invest in capital budget and/or technical personnel to implement and maintain their own storage infrastructure? There is nothing new about third-party storage services, but the complexity of today's backup, replication, and disaster recovery needs has renewed their popularity. The key advantage to SaaS is cost savings. Storage space is basically rented from the provider using a cost-per-Gb stored or cost-per-data transferred model. There is no capital expenditure for the enterprise that pays only for the storage that they use. What is the future if Cloud Storage? What client software should be use? What type of data to be outsourced out? What happens to lost data? We will provide answers to your questions.
Biodata
 SS Lim is the Managing Director of PTC System (S) Pte Ltd., a leading vendor in enterprise data management, data security, grid computing and content delivery. He has 20 years experience in the IT industries and worked for various organizations. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, Diploma in Electrical and Electronic / Marketing.
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"An Exchange for SaaS "
Speaker: Lim Chiin Hwa Executive Director (AkSaaS Pte Ltd)
Abstract
Software as a Service (SaaS) providers are involved in an ever growing market that is forecast to reach US$14.5B by 2011 (IDC). The drive to deliver SaaS is forcing many independent software vendors (ISV) to worry about challenges like datacenter management, compute power, storage availabilities and many more related issues. These companies are quickly realizing that delivering a cost-effective service with guaranteed performance is a highly specialized activity, and instead of planning for new product innovation, their resources are focused on maintenance. We will look into the issues related to this growing market from SaaS evolution to the strategies in making the change from existing client-server to on-demand solutions for ISVs.
Biodata
 Chiin began his 17-year love affair with IT as a systems engineer with SCS, and moved into R&D environment working at a start-company from Stanford University. He founded Nothacker Pte Ltd in 2006 and renamed Aksaas in 2008 to reflect the direction of the business the company is moving into.
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"Infrastructure 2.0 - IT Management Made Easier with HaaS "
Speaker: Alex Ng Managing Director (ClearManage Pte Ltd)
Abstract
IT management had traditionally meant significant amount of infrastructure and asset, and the people and skills necessary to make them tick. The evolution of IT management has always been towards increased automation to manage these systems, but you are still face with huge, badly utilized infrastructure and new skill set required to manage in addition to these systems and the automation system.
IT management, to which we are more concern with, are the ways the datacenter landscape is changing, namely, towards Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS), which essentially means hosting your applications behind a URL instead of on-premise, more or less. Infrastructure 2.0, if you will, and it is with this shift in the way datacenter are deployed and consumed, that makes IT management that much easier.
The maturation of the Internet economy and the rise of Web 2.0 have pushed the limits of existing IT infrastructure and a new generation of innovators have emerged to define Infrastructure 2.0. Technologies in Grid and Cloud computing will change the way consumer purchase IT hardware, software and services. Business will need to adapt from what they have today and where they will be going to make full use of the advantage Infrastructure 2.0 brings to their business bottom line and limited IT resources. The magic of the “Grid or Cloud” is going to come down to cost and speed of deployment and scaling, and ease of management. HaaS made it easier to manage IT infrastructure, but it does not replace good old system administration and automation.
Biodata
 Alex is a business owner of a Managed Hosting and IT Service company providing innovative and quality manage hosting and IT service in Singapore since 2005. A hands-on entrepreneur always on the look out for best in breed technologies that will enhance IT utilization in SMEs and enterprise, helping stake holders to make use of IT to improve their business efficiency and effectiveness. Alex has spent much of his working life in various IT and business positions, from web development house, ISP to enterprise IT and process/business management. He has an intimate understanding of small to mid size businesses IT needs and how they should be addressed.
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Session: Cloud Computing
"From Grids to Clouds"
Speaker:Prof Dr Wolfgang Gentzsch Dissemination Advisor, (DEISA)
Abstract
The speaker will describe how to 'Cloud-enable' Grids, how to integrate Clouds into today’s Grids, or how to move today's Grids to Clouds. He will conclude how (existing) infrastructures can/could/should transition to Clouds, when this makes sense, and what the benefits are, and when should a grid better be called a Cloud, and what the key characteristics of a Clouds are or could/should be, as well as the Cloud portal that hides all the grid plumbing from the user. The speaker will analyze DEISA as an example.
Biodata
 Prof Dr Wolfgang Gentzsch is dissemination advisor of the DEISA Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, adjunct professor at Duke University and visiting scientist at Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as well as member of the US President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.
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"Using Clouds to Provide Grids Higher-Levels of Abstraction"
Speaker: Shantenu Iha Senior Research Scientist, Center of Computation & Technology (Louisiana State University)
Abstract
Grids in their current form of deployment and implementation have not been as successful as hoped in engendering distributed applications. Amongst other reasons, the level of detail that needs to be controlled for the successful development and deployment of applications remains too high. We argue that there is a need for higher levels of abstractions for current Grids. By introducing the relevant terminology, we try to understand Grids and Clouds as systems; we find this leads to a natural role for the concept of _Affinity_, and argue that this is a missing element in current Grids. Providing these affinities and higher-level abstractions is consistent with the common concepts of Clouds. Thus this paper establishes how Clouds can be viewed as a logical and next higher-level abstraction from Grids.
Biodata
 Shantenu Jha is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Computation and Technology and an Assistant Research Professor in the Computer Science Department at Louisiana State University. He is also a Visiting Fellow at University College London. He currently serves as a co-chair of the SAGA Working Group of the Open Grid Forum. His research interests are primarily in Computational Physics and Grid Computing. His working definition of the later is that it is a novel, potentially very useful, though currently very painful way of doing the former. When he is not busy feeling the pain (e.g. battling 'lower upper-level grid-middleware' or put simply - grid software) or with work that aims to lessen the pain (grid programming models, 'simple' APIs for grid applications), he works on research problems in Statistical Physics. For the past few years he has been working on biologically inspired problems using computational techniques (primarily molecular dynamics simulations) and statistical physics tools. He has also looked at the transport properties of electrons in Quantum Dots using Monte Carlo simulations.
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"Sun Initiatives in Grid & Cloud Computing - Configuring the Cloud"
Speaker: Dr Stephen C. Perrenod HPC Business Development Director, Asia-Pacific (Sun Microsystems)
Abstract
For a quarter of a century, Sun Microsystems has pioneered the vision "The Network is the Computer" and developed and deployed distributed computing technologies. In this talk, we will provide an overview of Sun's current Grid and Cloud offerings and projects under development. These include Grid Engine, the Sun Modular Datacenter ("Grid in a Box"), the Network.com cloud computing infrastructure, Java CAPS for SOA and development projects such as Caroline - for greater ease in developing and deploying open services (Platform as a service) and Hydrazine - for rapid development and deployment of media rich mashup services in Java. All of these efforts are designed to accelerate applications deployment in the most rapidly growing "Redshift" sectors which include the HPC, Web 2.0 and SaaS domains.
Biodata
 Dr Stephen Perrenod is Director for Sun's HPC business development in the Asia-Pacific region. He has worked 8 years at Sun including leading HPC Marketing at Sun headquarters in Menlo Park, California. He has been involved in high performance and scientific computing for 25 years in technical, sales and marketing roles with Cray Research, Alliant, SGI, and the cluster and multi-core optimization startup eXludus. He holds a BS degree in Physics from MIT and Masters and PhD degrees in Astrophysics from Harvard University.
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"Dynamic Grid Computing with Red Hat Enterprises MRG"
Speaker: Sivaram Shunmugam Solutions Architect ASEAN (Red Hat)
Abstract
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Biodata
As a Solutions Architect for ASEAN, Siva acts as a technical front for the sales team, responsible for pre-sales support to the channels and Account Managers in the region. In addition to designing Linux-based and JBoss middleware solutions for enterprise customers, Siva delivers sales and technical training for partners in Linux and Java enterprise middleware and has represented Red Hat in various speaking engagements in the region. Siva is also in charge of the Red Hat and Intel Center of Excellence program, designed to help enterprise IT organizations and software companies accelerate the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions optimized for the Intel platform. He continues to implement a range of sales programs with Dell’s sales team, having previously managed a hugely successful program for Red Hat training courses through the Dell channel in ASEAN. Prior to Red Hat, Siva was a consultant with Scalable Systems Pte Ltd, where he was lead consultant in various IT projects across the region, with a strong expertise in high performance networking technologies. Siva holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical) from National University of Singapore.
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"Scalable Application in the Cloud"
Speaker: Dekel Tankel Director of Technical Alliances, Business Development (GigaSpaces)
Abstract
Cloud computing services (like The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - EC2) are revolutionary computing utilities that enable adding and removing compute resources on-demand, with the benefit of only paying for the hardware and software resources needed, as and when they are needed. But there is a gap: with traditional middleware stacks, such as J2EE and LAMP, developing and deploying reliable transactional and data-intensive applications on cloud environment is extremely complex and time-consuming. GigaSpaces XAP , the cloud application server, bridges this gap and makes on-demand application scalability (on top of the on-demand hardware scalability) a practical reality. In this session we will explore the challenges and propose a solution, including a live demo on EC2.
Biodata
 Dekel has more than 10 years of software engineering and architectural background, and am presently leading the technical business development and Eco-System of GigaSpaces' SaaS and Cloud Computing business unit. This includes development of cloud offerings with Amazon EC2, Sun, HP, Excelian, RightScale, and several cloud vendors world wide. Previously Dekel was managing GigaSpaces' global support organization. Between the years 2001 to 2006, Dekel was a part of the R&D group at Viola Networks, a global Voice over IP Software Company in which he led the architectural and development of a distributed VoIP performance management system. Between the years 1998 to 2000 Dekel was a part of the Technion Research and Development foundation in Israel, in which he led the development and implementation of a Customer Relationship Management system. Dekel is a major at the Israeli Navy, and between the years 1996 to 1998 he was in charge of large-scale software implementations at the naval flagship vessels. Dekel holds an MBA degree in Business Management and a BA degree in Computer Science.
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"Cloud Computing from Inside: An Oracle's Experience"
Speaker: U-Jin Kim Director, Linux and Open Source (Oracle Asia Pacific)
Abstract
The speaker will share the Oracle story of using new technologies like Virtualization and Linux for Delivering Business Value with the Next Generation Data Center.
Biodata
 U-Jin Kim is director of Linux and Open source at Oracle Asia Pacific. He obtained his BS degree from the Korea University, with major in Information Engineering and in Electronics. He also obtained an MBA from Korea University, with major in Marketing.
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"Enabling Cloud Computing with Xen"
Speaker: Dr Michael Harries Director Strategy and Operations, Advanced Products Group (Citrix Systems)
Abstract
Cloud Computing is the future of the Internet. Exciting new developments include Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. For larger organizations, Infrastructure as a Service promises to provide major benefits without incurring major redevelopment costs. The speaker will talk about the opportunities for IT organizations, new capabilities, and the path to achieving these.
Biodata
Dr Michael Harries is Director of Technology Strategy at Citrix Systems. He has roles within both the Citrix Advanced Products Group and the Citrix CTO Office to ensure that Citrix remains abreast of technology and market evolution. Michael has direct responsibility for Citrix innovation via an internal ideation process and the education of all Citrix employees about the technology landscape. In the Advanced Products Group, Michael steers research and investigation activities toward game changing technologies and strategic entry to new markets. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Economics.
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Session: Software-as-a-Service
"SaaS: Business Myth or Reality"
Speaker: Alvin Lim Regional Director Hosting & Software Services, Asia Pacific (Microsoft Corporation)
Abstract
Traditionally, companies buy software and then install and maintain these applications on their own machines. That model is giving way to one where companies will buy subscriptions and access services over the Internet from software developers that host their own applications. The concept is simple and attractive: rather than buying a software license for an application such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) and installing this software on individual machines, a business signs up to use the application hosted by the company that develops and sells the software, giving the buyer more flexibility to switch vendors and perhaps fewer headaches in maintaining the software. Some applications will migrate to the new delivery model faster than others, but the reality remains that software makers are only beginning to explore the economics and necessary capabilities for online delivery. This is evident even for an advanced market like the US where Microsoft estimates that by 2009; only less than 8% of software revenue will be contributed from online delivery model. While some customers prefer on demand or on premise strictly for religious reasons, the vast majority of business decision makers will choose a particular software solution based on current business needs, resource allocation and corporate objectives. These factors can change with the weather. That’s why buyers will need help to rationalize any purchase decision based on their needs – and that’s why many customers may opt for the wrong model or even choose both on-demand and on-premise solutions, depending on the situation. This presentation provides a view of the above challenges and concerns.
Biodata
 Alvin is responsible for providing strategic leadership and industry expertise for the group's hosting and software services business. In his capacity, he works closely with hosting partners and the independent software vendor community to drive and execute business initiatives and strategies for Microsoft. Based in Singapore, he also leads a team that provides cross-functional team training and coaching throughout the Asia Pacific, Greater China, India and Japan region. Alvin brings to Microsoft over 18 years of industry experience. Prior to joining Microsoft, Lim also held senior management roles in Datacraft Asia, Icon Medialab Asia and Oracle Consulting Services. Early in his IT career, Alvin also served as a contract consultant for Accenture and IBM Services team
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"SaaS on the Grid "
Speaker: Teong Eng Guan General Manager ASEAN (Red Hat)
Abstract
Open Source and SaaS are converging to fundamentally change the economics of enterprise software. This convergence will radically alter the selection, investment, deployment and support that businesses use today. Learn how Red Hat and with our ISV partners are making this convergence happen and what it means to customers.
Biodata
 TEONG Eng Guan joined Red Hat in June 2007 as the company's ASEAN General Manager to lead and grow Red Hat's business in the region. With more than a decade of sales management experience in the IT industry, Eng Guan is responsible for both short and long-term performance objectives and for driving policies and procedures that support the expansion of Red Hat's presence in ASEAN. Eng Guan also manages channel relations and ensures Red Hat employees remain at the top of their game through staff training. Prior to Red Hat, Eng Guan served as Country Manager for Avaya Singapore; where he successfully transformed the channel infrastructure and surpassed the revenue target twofold. Prior to that, he was the Singapore Sales Director at BEA Systems where he revamped the channel system through their partner program. Eng Guan holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (USA) and an MBA from the Imperial College School of Management (UK).
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"SaaS ISV Global Issues and Challenges"
Speaker: Ms Rosella Santos Senior Pre Sales Manager (QAD Asia)
Abstract
The rapid growth of the SaaS market is forcing nearly every established independent software vendor (ISV) to develop their own SaaS options. However, they face a myriad of challenges including:
- Re-architecting their existing applications to enable them to fully leverage the web and an assortment of new software development tools.
- Re-orienting their research organizations to fully understand the fundamental differences between software products and services.
- Re-structuring their packaging and pricing models to properly reflect the value of their new pay-as-you-go, subscription services
Biodata
 Rosella is South Asia Pre-sales Manager based in QAD Singapore. She is responsible for conducting product presentations and demonstrations, assists the Account Managers in the preparation of proposals, and trains service partners on the product. Before joining QAD in December 1997, Rosella was a Senior Consultant at Origin Philippines and Australia where she managed projects for implementing MFG/PRO and other ERP packages for their customer base. Rosella has 16 years experience in the Manufacturing industry and familiar with the different manufacturing process such as discrete, process, and Kanban. She has extensive industrial knowledge on the 6 verticals that QAD focus on such as Consumer Product Goods, Food & Beverage, High Technology, Automotive, Life Sciences and Industrial Manufacturing. Rosella has a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Adamson University of the Philippines
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"Financial Performance Delivered Through SaaS"
Speaker: Ian Kinsella Managing Director (Avartis)
Abstract
Finance leaders in most leading organisations recognise the need for more integrated financial planning, forecasting and month end reporting processes that support predictive results in the close process. The objective being to understand realistically where the business is heading so that they can make adjustments to get it back to where they want it to be. Technology is the enabler for connecting these processes, but typically organisations are limited to either using manual spreadsheet based systems that are difficult to manage, resulting in wasted time, inaccuracy of data and multiple “versions of the truth” or they have to look toward traditional enterprise software vendors with prices beyond the reach of many midsize companies. Avartis on the other hand represents a new generation of affordable financial planning, forecasting and reporting applications available as Saas. Rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach to the needs of finance - like what Saas CRM offerings prescribe for sales and marketing - Avartis provides flexibility and ease to configure models that reflect the unique financial needs of each organization whilst also providing seamless integration to existing financial systems and security assurance. Join this session to learn more about best practices in financial performance management and how Saas adoption has moved beyond the comfort-zone of CRM to meeting the business critical needs of financial decision makers.
Biodata
 Ian Kinsella is managing director of Avartis. He leads development of strategy and product direction for a suite of Avartis Saas/on-demand and on-premise solutions offerings as well as managing a specialized BPM consulting practice focused on best practices in financial planning, forecasting, consolidation and reporting. Ian has more than 18 years experience of consulting and global program management for clients in various industries. Prior to incorporating Avartis, he lead the ASEAN Business Intelligence team at Oracle and worked on a number of assignments for finance institutions centered around Basel compliancy and profitability analytics. He possesses in-depth knowledge of financial and operational performance management techniques, including operation and strategic planning, balanced scorecard, economic value-based financial management and incentive compensation. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, with concentrations in strategic management, finance and accounting.
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"Benefit of SaaS to SMBs"
Speaker: Milind Ghorpade Director of Services (ICSP Solutions Pte Ltd)
Abstract
The SaaS model gives SMBs the flexibility to pay, as per usage. They can scale up and down the usage as per their business requirements. This also demonstrates the business and technology engagement with low total cost of ownership. This willingness to adopt SaaS, and to commit critical operations to SaaS, fits well with SMB organizational. SMB executives tend to be less risk-averse and more aggressive adopters of IT than their counterparts at larger firms, even though this is often in an environment of constrained IT budgets. For vendors, the winners will be those that find ways to master the channel. To reach the SMB market, vendors will continue to need VARs and SIs who help integrate the solution. However, there may be other channels worth pursuing, such as community banks and Telco in particular - especially as the SaaS market ultimately penetrates the true small business segment (100 employees) where solutions will be completely verticalized.
Biodata
 Milind Ghorpade is Director of Services at ICSP Solutions Pte Ltd. He holds a Bachelor of Electronics and Telecommunications from Shivaji University and has over 17 years of working experience. Milind was previously CEO for Planet PSG, a part of Planet One group, where his role was to focus on growing and developing Planet PSG into a multi faceted professional services team that will grow beyond the existing skill sets and experience. Prior to Planet PSG, Milind was the Head of Support and Services for 3D Networks (India) and Project Manager / Business Development Manager of IGTL (S) Pte Ltd and Global Tele-System Ltd - International Business Division. He was instrumental in setting up remote Application Managed Service Center in Singapore and India for Supporting Self care application for Enterprise and Service providers in Asia Pacific, Including the Service offering Model.
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"Delivering Value through Pricing Excellence"
Speaker: Chung Chee Kong Founder & Managing Director (Acceval)
Abstract
In the perennial pursuit of profit improvement, most companies have mainly focused on the cost side of the equation. Yet, one value creation lever which holds significant potential for driving profitability has been relatively untapped - Pricing Management. This is especially true here in Asia where the level of awareness of the significance of and the various leading best practices in pricing management, is still relatively elementary. Based on analysis by leading management consultants, pricing is the most impactful lever to influence a company’s profitability. It is not surprising that in recent years, leading companies have made pricing management one of the key improvement initiatives and strategic weapon to drive margin improvement. This is helped, in no small part, by the advent of Pricing and Profit Management Solution, which enables many leading pricing best practices to become practical and sustainable through business process innovation powered by information technology. Such powerful pricing and profit management functionalities, have until now, been limited in its accessibility to large multinational companies which invest substantially to implement such solution on premise, within the companies firewalls. In keeping with industry trend to deliver affordable solution through Saas model, Acceval is now making its application available through its On Demand version. With this, Pricing Management is no longer just a best kept secret for large multinational companies, it is also envisaged that it will eventually be more widely adopted by the wider group of users as well
Biodata
 Chung Chee Kong is the founder and Managing Director of Acceval, a software cum consulting company, which provides “Price and Profit Management” solution and services for the B2B industries. His areas of expertise are Pricing and Supply Chain Management especially for the Manufacturing Industries. He has Pricing Research certification from Professional Pricing Society (PPS) and CPIM (APICS) certification. Mr. Chung is competent in both Management & Technology Consulting. Specifically for “Pricing Management” areas, he has helped various companies in the region embark on transformation initiatives such as Value Pricing implementation, Conjoint Pricing Research, Customer Segmentation (e.g. Worth Based, Needs Based), Customer Offerings Alignment, Pocket Price & Pocket Margin and Cost To Serve Modeling, and PriXLence software implementation (Acceval’s Pricing & Margin Management software). His experience included engagements with companies such as Sumitomo Chemical, The Polyolefin Company :- a Shell Chemical Joint Venture, Becton Dickinson, Petronas, Ranbaxy, Akzo Nobel, ExxonMobil and others.
At Acceval, Mr. Chung developed “Full Fledged Margin Optimisation Model”, a capability which aligns Pricing, Customer Strategy and Supply Chain, in order to optimise margin. This capability is enabled through PriXLence™, Acceval’s Pricing & Profit Optimization software; which received “Best Customer ROI” Award from SAP. Mr. Chung has written a number of articles in Pricing Management. He is also a regular speaker on this topic in regional forums and has delivered speeches as a guest lecturer at MacQuarie University (Australia) and National University of Singapore. Prior to founding Acceval, Mr. Chung was a Senior Executive at Accenture and Deloitte Consulting. He worked for Shell Eastern Petroleum before joining the consulting industry.
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Panel Discussion: "Is SaaS for You? "
Panelist
: Earl Allen Managing Director (Earth9.com Pte Ltd)
Biodata
 Earl Trevor Allan is Managing Director of earth9.com Pte Ltd, responsible for business direction, general management and growth of the company. He has worked with clients from National Parks, Clear Data Voice (a subsidiary of Ascendas), Hewlett Packard and Microsoft APAC, as well as consulted with clients such as Media Corp Technologies, Microsoft Learning APAC, the Youth Olympic Committee and General Motors – Singapore on how to leverage on and implement web technology and integrate applications from their backend to the front-end. Earth9.com has provided consultancy to and implemented for Ferrosan Global HQ their membership management system integrated to DreamMail. Earl obtained his Bachelor of Law from National University of Singapore and is a Certified IT Project Manager
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Session: Digital Media
"Using Grids for Animation Rendering"
Speaker:Tang Chi Sim Managing Director (Omens Studios)
Abstract
Omens Studios is a producer of high quality 3D animation. Due to the need to take on more complex assignments, the studio needed access to larger rendering facilities than those currently available in-house. NGO provided the opportunity to perform this rendering off-site in a secure manner. This case study describes the process involved in achieving this and the corresponding benefits involved
Biodata
 Chi Sim founded Omens Studios together with Hock, and is responsible primarily for business planning, business development, sales and marketing, and investor relations. Chi Sim also executive produces the studio's original IP and co-production projects. Before joining the animation industry, Chi Sim co-founded and ran earth9.com Pte Ltd, one of Singapore's most successful midsized interactive marketing agencies. He developed deep relationships with a blue chip clientele as well as partnerships with large global agencies, resulting in many large scale interactive projects around the world. His other career experience includes a stint at the National Computer Board (now Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore) and then at Microsoft Singapore. Chi Sim graduated with a Bachelor's degree (with Merit) in Computer Science on an accelerated program majoring in Artificial Intelligence from the National University of Singapore, where he was also part of the prestigious National Science and Research programme. He owns one patent in the area of collaborative information management.
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"3D User Generated Contents and Pervasive Rendering"
Speaker:Vincent Ong Managing Director (IM Innovations)
Abstract
Computationally intensive rendering resources have been traditionally associated with organizations involved in broadcast and post production, movies and games development.
The advent of affordable and easy-to-use digital media tools and powerful hardware and the increasing demand and expectations of consumers and customers for media-rich contents to engage them will provide the impetus for widespread creation of 3D digital contents.
Coupled with the proliferation of such user generated 3D contents by tech savvy youth, we foresee a new wave of demand for rendering resource or render farms that are centrally located or distributed in a grid.
We will share some insights, including showing 3D projects with Singapore schools and new industry users of interactive 3D applications, to illustrate potential trend.
Biodata
 Vincent has a vision to realize – making 3D interactive and digital media (IDM) pervasive. His company, IM Innovations Pte Ltd, founded in April 2003, partners with the best-of-breed global technology providers to empower youth and professionals with easy-to-use and affordable 3D IDM technology tools to create their own user generated 3D digital contents. His strategic initiatives to realize this goal have received wide support from government agencies including Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), Creative Community Singapore (CCS) and Media Development Authority (MDA). Vincent has more than 20 years of experience in the infocomm and digital media industry holding various positions in sales, marketing and management in multi-national corporations. He was in Silicon Graphics for 9 years and held the position of General Manager. He has also worked for NEC, Wang Computers and Digital Equipment. He earned his Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the National University of Singapore.
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"Xgrid in Distributed Computing Environments"
Speaker:Benjamin Khoo Systems Consultant (Apple Inc)
Abstract
This presentation looks at how Xgrid is used in production environments in Media related industries and Schools. It will look at some key features to the software and how it can be easily used to distribute jobs of various natures into a Mac based environment.
Biodata
 Benjamin has been involved with High Performance Computing (HPC) since 2000 beginning with SGI. Since then he has deployed cluster from IBM using tools such as OSCAR, ROCKS, CSM, XCAT and many more. He has designed and implemented Grid architectures in countries such as Australia, China and Singapore. He left IBM as an Asia Pacific Grid Architect and joined the Institute of High Performance Computing (A*STAR) in Singapore as part of a research team in Grid Computing architectures and middleware. Since then he has implemented many more clusters and Grids including visualization clusters and distributed computing infrastructures on many platforms. He is now in Apple Computer as a senior consultant in enterprise solutions and HPC on the Apple platform.
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"Remote Visualization across the Grid"
Speaker: Jeff Adie Principal Systems Engineer (SGI Asia Pacific)
Abstract
Grid computing gives us the opportunity to tackle large and complex problems through the utilisation of multiple computing resources. These computational tasks often produce results which must be visualised and the requirements trend is for larger and more complex models with larger and more complex visualisation requirements. Unfortunately, although computational workloads can be reasonably divided across grid resources, it is a much more complex proposition for visualisation workloads.
This talk looks at how we can deploy multiple "visual nodes" within a grid environment and utilise them in concert to provide a powerful resource for visualisation of high Performance computing workloads for both interactive visualisation and for such future tasks as computational steering
Biodata
 Jeff Adie has a very strong practical background in visual and high-performance computing with the ability to architect solutions for a broad mix of customers in the entertainment, simulation and HPC sectors. As both an artist and a technologist, Jeff has exensive experience and a considerable depth of knowledge in the areas of feature film, broadcast television, post-production, visualisation, simulation, performance tuning, and software design/development. Jeff’s current interests include research into real time simulation and rendering of large, complex scenes. As a principal engineer, Jeff is also involved with current and future products that SGI is developing.
Before joining SGI, Jeff worked as a senior VFX artist with Gibson Group Ltd.; as a consultant with Eagle Technology Ltd.; as a graphic artist for Video Images Ltd., and as a designer for ComputerVision Corp. He also founded and managed a successful private design company, Dataworks Design Limited, providing creative and consultative services to many design and production houses.
Jeff has a postgraduate Diploma of Computer Science in Computer Graphics and Parallel Architectures from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Jeff is also a professional member of ACM and SIGGRAPH.
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"Delivering Performance in Animation, Visual Effects, & Games"
Speakers: P. Krishna Prasad Executive Director & CTO and
Amit I. Srivastava Chairman & CEO (DUX Soft)
Abstract
HPC use in AVG industry differs from other applicable verticals, since AVG uses HPC to deliver the end product, whereas everyone else uses it primarily for R&D activities. AVG is a fast growing industry with focus on output & performance, with over 100+ applications and no set standards as each year the level of quality changes. The industry is further constrained by set budgets for each movie/product. DUX Soft is the world's leading HPC & Workflow solutions provider with its core focus on the AVG market and has been built from the ground-up to deliver incredible price/performance ratios, while providing last mile solutions that help customer get more out their assets through HPC. With its award winning render management toolset called SPARX and its partnership with Microsoft for Windows Clustering and Gemstone for caching technologies, DUX is making supercomputing personal for studios worldwide.
Biodata
 Krishna Prasad (KP), a Bachelor in Electronics and a veteran of 14 years in the IT space started his IT career with a leading corporate as a Systems engineer. Driven by his passion for the industry he explored new possibilities in the Global market space and chose the Media and Entertainment industry to become his playground. KP has designed 30+ Studios in the last 4 years with Heterogeneous (Windows, Linux and MAC) which are handling National and International Projects. KP along with a dedicated team has initiated work on designing Web-based Project-Management tool. A powerful and flexible tool to handle project-management & Workflow. The biggest advantage of this tool is, it can manage different pipelines (According for the type of project pipeline/workflow) in the single windows across multiple OS and multiple Browsers. Designed and implemented most popular Grid computing tools and also developed tools to enhance popular Cluster computing/Management tools. Also has the credibility of deploying world’s largest Parallel file Serving Central storage system across heterogeneous environment.
 Mr. Amit Srivastava is a seasoned entrepreneur and technology enthusiast who started his first company as a junior in college that dealt with P2P and next generation Internet technologies. A US citizen and a business graduate from the prestigious University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also took extensive courses in electrical & computer engineering, and physics, Amit was always an entrepreneur first. Amit teamed up with David Bunnell and next generation technologies guru and chief architect of Hewlett-Packard, Dr. Sandeep Chatterjee, to form Foundational Net, Inc. as a next generation Internet technologies pioneering company with focus on pay-per-use software delivery and service oriented architectures. Based in Berkeley, California the company has operations in India and currently boasts a network of over 50 partners and clients including IBM.
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"High Productivity Computing: Trends in Media and Entertainment"
Speaker: Jeff Wierer Senior Product Manager, Windows Server Division (Microsoft)
Abstract
The presentation will cover:
- Focus on the WW market drivers for digital animation
- Expanding role of Asia
- Specific solutions in broadcast, animation and gaming
- Specific customer efforts in Singapore
- New trends e.g. workstations moving up to server clusters, media encoding on MS platforms
Biodata
 Jeff Wierer is a Sr. Product Manager on the Windows Server team focused future business and product strategy for High Performance Computing. Jeff joined Microsoft in 1998 as a Consultant within Microsoft Consulting Services. Previous roles include being the Technical Product Manager for Exchange Server 2000, Sr. Technical Product Manager working on the vision and strategy for BizTalk Server 2002, 2004 and 2006 and as a Sr. Product Manager for Office SharePoint Server 2007.
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Session: Biomedical, Pharma and Life Sciences
"GPU-accelerated Grid Computing for Bioinformatics Applications"
Speaker: Dr Bertil Schmidt Associate Professor, School of Computer Engineering (Nanyang Technological University)
Abstract
We present a computational grid architecture based on a hybrid computing model to accelerate bioinformatics applications. The hybrid computing model consists of two types of parallelism: coarse grained and fine grained. The coarse-grained parallelism uses a grid computing infrastructure for job distribution, while the fine-grained parallelism uses GPUs (computer graphics hardware) for data parallelism. We present the deployment and evaluation of this approach for a variety of applications such as: PheGee@Home (a tool that nominates candidate genes responsible for a given phenotype), GPU-MEME (for the discovery of motifs that are statistically over-represented in groups of biological sequences), Molecular Dynamics, and error correction and assembly for new sequencing technologies (such as Solexa/Illumina).
Biodata
 Bertil Schmidt is Associate Professor at the School of Computer Engineering at NTU, Singapore. Prior to that, he was faculty member at the University of New South Wales and Senior Researcher at the University of Melbourne. At NTU he also held appointments as Program Director M.Sc. in Bioinformatics and Deputy Director of BMERC. Before coming to Singapore, he held research appointments at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and RWTH Aachen. Bertil has been involved in the design and implementation of parallel algorithms and architectures for over a decade. He has worked extensively with fine-grained (e.g. GPUs, FPGAs, Cell BE), coarse-grained (clusters, grids) as well as hybrid parallel architectures. He has successfully applied these technologies to various domains including bioinformatics, image processing, multimedia video compression, and cryptography. He has published in journals such as Journal of VLSI Signal Processing, Microelectronic Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on IT in Biomedicine, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, Future Generation Computer Systems, Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, Autoimmunity.
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"In-Silico Protein Folding on the Grid"
Speaker:Dr Thomas Leonard Joseph Post Doctoral Research Fellow (Bioinformatics Institute)
Abstract
In-silico protein folding and drug discovery have been paradigms for the successful use of the worldwide grid of computers. The protocols used and some of the results obtained will be discussed and compared with comparative uses of cluster computing.
Biodata
 Dr Thomas Joseph did his PhD in Jadavpur University in India in the field of pharmaceutical sciences - in particular in ligand based drug discovery, in 2006. He has joined the Bioinformatics Institute in the group of Bimolecular Modelling & Design and involved in small molecule docking to target proteins and molecular dynamics of small molecules and proteins.
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"Image Informatics for High content screening "
Speaker: Angela Jean Lecturer, School of Chemical and Life Sciences (Nanyang Polytechinic)
Abstract
The Her2/neu (also known as c-erbB2) oncogene is a cell-surface membrane tyrosine kinase receptor that is overexpressed in 20% to 30% of breast cancer cases and is significantly associated with breast cancer recurrence and death in the last two decades. While a protocol is in place to grade cell samples according to membrane staining, the assessment is intrinsically subjective and presents variability between observers. Here, we present an automated grading system where cancer cell images, through various classification, segmentation and measurement methods are putatively scored. The application allows the input of the image, and a score is predicted based on the same criteria observed by a histopathologist. >From our training data, we are able to obtain the segmenting value for each corresponding colour of the stained membrane for each scoring criterion which allows the tissue sample to be scored accordingly. This is essentially a computationally intensive application which will benefit from the advent of technologies in high performance computing.
Biodata
 Angela Jean is teaching in the School of Chemical and Life Sciences at the Nanyang Polytechnic. She is currently the President of the International Society for Computational Biology (RSG Singapore) as well as the Association of Medical and Bio-Informatics Singapore (Student Council). She received her B.Sc. (Hons) from the University of London and M.Sc. in Bioinformatics from Nanyang Technological University (NTU). She did postgraduate research in genomics and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the BioInformatics Research Centre at NTU. Her research interests include genome analysis, DNA microarray probe design optimization, cancer research and epidemiological studies of infectious diseases.
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"How Data Pipelining Enables the Deployment of Service Oriented Solutions on Cloud and Grid Based Architectures"
Speaker: Dr Micheal J. Doyle FCPS, MRSC (Accelrys Inc.)
Abstract
As the demands for access to data, information and computing resources increases, inevitably the conventional approach of requirements gathering, design, specification and delivery will continue to fall short of dynamic user requirements. These needs include, on demand access to complex cloud computing resources, as well as delivering information from a wide and constantly changing series of sources (bio, financial, analytical, text and chemical) to RSS, portal or web based feed and reporting systems. Data Pipelining is a source agnostic visual programming and application integration approach which at its heart seeks to make data, meta data and derived data of any form available easily and simply to the end users. Such empowerment will drive the reuse of existing data silos as well as the dynamic demand driven reporting and analysis of this information. It will also shorten the business process involved in and around the deployment of data services allow the aggregation of complex unstructured data in reports and analyses, and drive the deployment of business, technical and contextually complex information.
Organizations now generate vast amounts of very disparate data from finance, measurement, chemistry, genomics and high throughput screening. This data is often stored in disconnected databases and / or files in a wide variety of formats. Data Pipelining is an approach to enable you to integrate these data sources so that analyses can be done across data stored in different places. As the volume and types of data has grown, software companies have responded by producing many point solutions to different parts of the data analysis process. These use many different formats and run on a selection of different hardware platforms. As you will see in this talk, Data Pipelining can help you connect these point solutions together. In this way you can construct a single integrated data processing procedure that takes data from the beginning to the end of the process very straightforwardly, something that is typically not possible with the disparate point solutions on their own. This lets data processing workflows be automated and run where appropriate without manual intervention, such as content feeds into Microsoft SharePoint or other portal environments.
The workflows that are constructed are captured graphically within the system. They can be deployed through a Data Pipelining method for example Pipeline Pilot, to web pages or through other applications that are already in place. The interface choice can be determined by the needs of a type of end user not by the software. Finally, it is becoming more and more important to capture and document data processing workflows, for auditing and compliance reasons. Pipeline Pilot automatically captures its procedures in just such a way.
Biodata
 Michael J. Doyle is a Principal Scientist at Accelrys, a solutions provider for Scientific Business Intelligence. He is responsible for planning, execution and business development for SciTegic Enterprise Server and Pipeline Pilot software platform for all worldwide sales regions. His area of specialism includes informatics, materials design and pharmaceutical development and design.
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"Efficient Hybrid Computing with Progeniq FPGA Accelerators"
Speaker: Chua Teck Hiong VP, Business Development (Progeniq Pte Ltd)
Abstract
Many industries rely on increasingly powerful computational infrastructure to either conduct research or develop new products, or High Performance Computing (HPC). Examples include the field of bioinformatics where available genome data is increasing at the rate of a doubling every year, making computational processing ever more intensive. This is illustrated in the growth in size of GenBank (the global repository where genome sequences are stored).
In the computer animations and special effects industry, demand for more realistic visuals has resulted in higher computational requirements with each movie release. For example, the movie "A Bug's life" from Pixar in 1998 was rendered on about 1,000 processors (approximately 4,000 '95 CPUs), while the 2005 "King Kong" by Weta Digital needed 5,000 processors (approximately 60,000 '95 CPUs) for special effects rendering. And these were a huge exponential increase over the 117 computational nodes for Toy Story in 1995.
This increase in computational infrastructure size has needed a corresponding increase in the amount of investment needed to purchase that infrastructure. However, because each new movie introduces new features in animations – Bug's Life with foliage transparency, and Monsters Inc with fur, Madagascar with 'stretchable' characters – the total rendering time needed for a movie has increased in spite of higher investments in larger rendering infrastructure.
Progeniq's Boost Platform utilizes reconfigurable computing technology to provide a cost-effective high performance computing solution which can offer acceleration of between 10-50 x 2.4GHz CPU cores of performance, for specific applications which we develop on reconfigurable chips (known as Field Programmable Gate Arrays / FPGAs). The FPGA Boost solutions are very low in power consumption, and space saving, when compared to ordinary CPUs.
Deployed together with general purpose CPUs, the Progeniq Boost solutions provide a hybrid computing platform, to maintain maximum scalability, to solve the most intensive computing challenges of today
Biodata
 Teck Hiong is a serial entrepreneur, and was the CEO of Thinking Pictures Asia, an outdoor digital media startup in 2004-2005. He was also actively involved in management positions with two other startups in Singapore - Blumice International (Insolvency/Legal Management System Company), and VOLE Inc (VOIP Service Provider). Teck Hiong has an honours degree from the National University of Singapore in Computer Engineering, and spent one year pursuing a minor in Technopreneurship in the Wharton Business School in 2003, where he interned for the Science Center Port IT/Life Sciences Incubator to facilitate incubatees in seeking VC funding biology, design of algorithms, pattern matching, and gene regulation. His academic work has focused on key problems in DNA sequencing, a range of pattern comparison, database search, and sequence analysis problems. Published papers include “Separation of nearly identical repeats in shotgun assemblies using defined nucleotide positions, DNPs”, Bioinformatics. 2002,“ Correcting errors in shotgun sequences”, Nucleic Acids Research. 2003, “A Genetic variation map for chicken with 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms”, Nature 2004 and “Cloning of a human parvovirus by molecular screening of respiratory tract samples”, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2005. His recent research is focused on non-coding RNA and gene regulation; “MicroTar: predicting microRNA targets from RNA duplexes”, BMC Bioinformatics 2006.
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"Integrative workflows for Life Sciences - Surveillance of Diseases, Food & Herbs and Chemicals & Drugs"
Speaker: Lim Teck Sin (KOOPrime Pte Ltd, Singapore)
Abstract
KOOPrime recently setup a joint venture with Eu Yan Sang International to focus on surveillance, control and compliance of traditional Chinese medicine and food. The approach taken is to develop iGATES to track from TCM supplies to QA/QC laboratories, and eventually integrate with downstream manufacturing hubs and distribution channels. Of interest is also biomarker development to uniquely identify samples and enable robust tracking. In parallel, KOOPrime is also working with partners of DENGUEINFO in the area of infectious diseases surveillance, and pushing iCHEMS to enable safety of chemicals in life sciences and beyond. Core to these developments will be the setup BIOMIRROR to enable sharing of bio-databases, applications and compute resources cost effectively.
Biodata
 Lim Teck Sin founded KOOPrime in 2000, one of the first companies that focus on life science informatics. Since then, Mr Lim has setup a subsidiary to provide Validation and Compliance services across Asia, a bioinformatics centre that focus on herbal genomics research in Hong Kong, and sales office at Malaysia. The shareholders include National University of Singapore, Glaxo Smith Kline, Merlion Pharmaceuticals and BioOne Capital. In recognition for the growth of KOOPrime, Lim Teck Sin was awarded the Best Entrepreneur, Science & SOC, Centennial Entrepreneurship Awards by National University of Singapore in 2005.
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"Detection of Genomic Copy Number Variation using Next Generation Sequencing Technologies"
Speaker: Dr Martti Tammi Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences (National University of Singapore)
Abstract
-
Biodata
 Martti Tammi joined The National University of Singapore in April 2004. He is cross-appointed as Assistant Professor in The Department of Biochemistry, The Faculty of Medicine and The Department of Biological Sciences, The Faculty of Science and affiliated with MTC, The Medical Nobel Institute, Karolinska Insitutet, Sweden. Martti received his PhD in Medical Sciences from the Uppsala University, Sweden in 2002. His research interests include computational molecular biology, design of algorithms, pattern matching, and gene regulation. His academic work has focused on key problems in DNA sequencing, a range of pattern comparison, database search, and sequence analysis problems. Published papers include “Separation of nearly identical repeats in shotgun assemblies using defined nucleotide positions, DNPs”, Bioinformatics. 2002,“Correcting errors in shotgun sequences”, Nucleic Acids Research. 2003, “A Genetic variation map for chicken with 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms”, Nature 2004 and “Cloning of a human parvovirus by molecular screening of respiratory tract samples”, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2005. His recent research is focused on non-coding RNA and gene regulation; “MicroTar: predicting microRNA targets from RNA duplexes”, BMC Bioinformatics 2006.
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Session: Financial Services Industry
"Grid & HPC in Finance – Lessons Learnt from the Field"
Speaker & Panelist: Gabriel Sallah Senior Grid/HPC Architect (Standard Chartered Bank)
Abstract
The financial industry has been one the early adopters and consumers of Grid and High performance computing. We have seen in the last few years an arms race between the various investments banks to build bigger, faster and more scalable grids to satisfy their growing business needs. Grid computing has been deployed at a number of these banks to provide timely risk pricing calculations, algorithmic trading, and Monte Carlo simulations. This presentation will look at the various implementations of grid computing in mainly investment banks - starting with the underlining hardware infrastructure, then moving to the middleware tier that allows the provisioning, deployment, orchestration of applications workloads. Once this service oriented infrastructure is in place, the next step is to create an enterprise wide grid that allows for lending, borrowing, sharing of resources. Grid computing is a disruptive technology as such a number of challenges will be encountered during the adoption of this technology. The politics of managing a shared grid based solution will be discussed and its implications on service and operating levels agreements. High performance computing and the use of hardware accelerators devices to speed up risk calculations will be covered in the presentation. Finally the presentation will close with the future of grid computing in finance concentrating on technologies such as utility, on-demand, cloud and virtualized computing.
Biodata
 Gabriel Sallah is a Senior Grid/HPC Architect currently working for Standard Chartered Bank. He was previously with Barclays Capital and IBM as the Lead Deep Computing Architect for EMEA designing and implementing a number of large scale HPC supercomputers across Automotive, Oil, Financial, Academia, Government, Life sciences sectors. His main areas of expertise are Grid-based infrastructure solutions and virtualization technologies. He has written a number of publications on virtualization and High performance computing. He graduated from Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh Scotland with a BSc degree in Computing and finance. He is currently a part-time PhD student at Cranfield University, with research interests in grid storage and management of real-time and historical data within a grid infrastructure.
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"Accelerating FSI application with state-of-the-art SOA"
Speaker:Laurence Liew Director, Open Source Grid Development Centre (Platform Computing Singapore)
Abstract
Platform Symphony enables developers to quickly achieve application performance objectives through a single, high-level programming paradigm for multi-core and multi-node environments. It is the fastest High Performance Computing (HPC) service-oriented infrastructure software solution developed specifically for organizations that deploy multiple applications. Platform Symphony has been used by major FSI organizations worldwide as the utility computing foundation to meet various lines of business objectives, and at the same time eliminates the complexity of managing a shared pool of nodes, enabling enterprise-class resource sharing, availability, security, and scale. This session will cover an overview of Symphony, and share with audience several user cases and user success stories.
Biodata
 Laurence Liew manages Platform Computing Inc. Open Source Grid Development Centre (OSGDC) in Singapore and HPCCommunity.org – a global resource for the HPC developers, users and engineers. Laurence is a veteran of the open source and HPC/Grid community and has been promoting the use of Linux/HPC/Grid since 1998. He was involved in building the very first commercial Linux cluster for a local research institute in 1999 and has since implemented and consulted for many organizations in APJ, Europe and US, on HPC and Grid. Laurence graduated from National University of Singapore with First Class Honors in Engineering.
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"Low latency Data Grids in Finance"
Speaker: Jags Ramnarayan Chief Architect (Gemstone Systems)
Abstract
Investment banks rely extensively on grids to dramatically increase throughput for their calculations in analytics (especially risk). The traditional design pattern involves executing compute intensive workflows where jobs require movement of large data files to the compute nodes, calculation results creating files which then are again consumed by the next job in the flow. Jobs tended to be long running. Increasingly, the pattern is shifting to running tasks that are short lived and run more frequently where the bottleneck is data i.e. the time spent to move data back and forth between compute nodes can be overwhelming - turning a compute bound job to be a IO bound one. For instance, real time pricing for financial derivative instruments could just take a few milliseconds, but, the time required for the data transfer could be hundreds of milliseconds.
The talk focuses on one architectural pattern gaining popularity - move the compute to the data. The data is partitioned in grid memory across many nodes and the compute task is routed to the node with the right data set provisioned based on the data hints it provides during launch.
We discuss the features of the main-memory based data grid solution that uses different data partitioning policies such as hashing or data relationship based to manage data across a large cluster of nodes. We also discuss techniques for rebalancing data and behavior across the Grid nodes to achieve the best throughput and lowest latency.
Biodata
 As the Chief Architect for GemStone Systems, Jags is responsible for the technology direction for its high performance distributed data Grid platform. Jags has been very active in the Java standards community representing GemStone in the EJB expert group and the J2EE platform specification. In the past, Jags represented BEA in the W3C SOAP protocol specification, JAXM and other standards. Jags has presented in conferences like JavaOne, W3C, Open Grid Forum, Platform Grid conference, etc.
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"Grid Computing for Financial Services"
Speaker: Kumaran Pillai Chief Executive Officer (Protégé)
Abstract
The ongoing adoption of Grid Computing for Financial Services has enabled financial organizations to develop new capabilities without the need to own the infrastructure to access the additional compute power. Open grid platforms offer users unique benefits through transitive relationships with suppliers, distributors and clients. Business relationships need to be redefined in the ever changing landscape and new partnerships have to be forged with actors outside your own domain and industry.
The executive briefing narrates how technology plays a part in achieving top line growth and profitability and how you can achieve business agility by adopting open grid platforms. Learn how to develop your own grid roadmap and learn how to develop a strategy for success
Biodata
 Kumaran Pillai, a Singaporean Technopreneur, winner of several innovation awards, has been involved in more start-up projects than he would actually admit. He started his career at HP and after a short stint there realized that the world of entrepreneurship has more to offer than just a career. “It is a way of life,” he says. Pillai started his first business at the age of twenty-nine and he had quick success within the first year of business. However, he found out very soon that the success didn’t prepare him for the downturn that he was about to face. He had to shutdown his first company after less than two years of operation during the 2002 recession. Despite the odds and the initial setback, Pillai founded Protegesoft in 2002 to provide IT professional services to Banks and Financial Institutions. In late 2004, he started developing Investment Portfolio Optimization Solutions.
Pillai realized that transforming the business from a services company to a product company was a major undertaking. He recruited Intel, HP and Microsoft as business partners to fill the competency gaps within his organization where he lacked specific skills in High Performance Computing. He further used the market reach of his business partners to launch his products in the Asia Pacific Region.
His key innovation lies in the ability to optimize portfolios of any size making it viable for banks to provide premium investment advice to smaller portfolios in spite of the low revenues earned per account. Traditionally, banks were only able to provide such premium services to high net worth individuals.
The impact of his work will be most evident in the world of micro-investments— the solutions running on the Itanium Platform will emancipate millions of micro-investors who otherwise will never get the opportunity to participate in the wealth creation process. Pillai graduated from the His hobbies includes writing, listening to music, reading about history and doing social work. He is blessed with a wife and two children
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"Global On Request Insurance Service"
Speaker: David Piesse Global Head of Insurance (Sun Microsystems)
Abstract
The speaker will share how multi channel integration, disruption and real time risk management through grid computing would benefit the insurance industry at large.
Biodata
 David Piesse is a financial services practitioner with 30 years of experience in the industry and has combined IT, risk management and insurance, banking, cap markets into a career spanning 4 continents. Currently Global head of Insurance for SUN Microsystems and part of the Global Financial Services team, Mr. Piesse resides in HK and is responsible for vertical industry solutions driving SUN's product range. Mr Piesse has worked for large banks, insurance companies, securities houses and the United Nations/World Bank in the course of his career. He is Chartered Member of the Insurance Institute and a Chartered IT practitioner with the British Computer Society.
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"Extreme Transaction Processing for Financial Services Industry"
Speaker: Yeo Eng Guan Senior Sales Manager (Oracle Singapore)
Abstract
The success of a financial services firm is largely dependent on the products and services innovation of financial services industry, and the speed to execute. Coupled with the fact that the exponential growth of data with the financial services, the needs for extreme performance is even more critical. Multi-channel customer-facing applications as well as risk management are 2 areas that require extreme performance. In this session, Eng Guan would like to share the challenges that financial services firms are facing in this area, and the solutions and how some of the leading financial services organizations have done to achieved extreme performance.
Biodata
 Eng Guan is a seasoned IT professional for more than 12 years. He specializes in middleware technologies and has helped several MNC to adopt J2EE and SOA technologies. He had been with BEA for 5 years where he served as an architect. In Oracle, he specializes in Coherence, Oracle latest acquisition for Grid platform. Eng Guan has a Bsc (Computer Science).
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Panel Discussion: "Virtualized IT Service Delivery in Banking & Financial Markets: Today’s Real Examples; Tomorrow's New Examples"
Moderator: Dr Steven Miller Practice Professor and Dean, School of Information Systems (Singapore Management University)
Biodata
 Dr Miller is founding Dean of the School of Information Systems (SIS) at Singapore Management University, and also serves as Practice Professor of Information Systems. Since 2003, he has led efforts to launch and establish the undergraduate, graduate and professional programs of the SIS. Immediately prior to joining SMU, Dr Miller served as Chief Architect Executive for the Business Consulting Services unit of IBM Global Services in Asia Pacific. He held prior industry appointments with Fujitsu Network Systems, and with RWD Technologies. Dr Miller started his professional career as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, conducting research and teaching related to Computer-Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics applications and impacts.
He has a Bachelors of Engineering Degree in Systems Engineering (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters of Science in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.
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Panelists: Goh Boon Seng Vice President (Deutsche Bank AG, Asia Pacific Head Office) & Warwick Edwin Fraser Director (Barclays Capital)
Biodata
 Boon Seng started as a systems programmer in National Computer Board in 1987 and went on to head up the infrastructure section in the NCB IS department before working on the National Information Infrastructure. He left NCB to join Deutsche Bank in 1996. Till last year, he was the Asia-Pacific IT Head for Deutsche Bank’s financial messaging systems which are used by the various business lines in more than 25 locations around the region. He was also responsible for a 24hr Global IT Support Center in Singapore. Recently, he moved into a new global role of Infrastructure Services Manager - interfacing between the Bank’s application and infrastructure organizations.
Boon Seng is a British Computer Society member and Chartered IT Professional, and a member of Singapore Computer Society. He has a MSc (Distinction) from Edinburgh University, Scotland with speciality in networking, distributed systems and high performance computing.
 Warwick Fraser is currently responsible for Data Centre Services and Incident, Problem and Change Management functions in Barclays Capital, covering the Asia Pacific region while based in Singapore. This role involves not only the day to day operations and controls, but also providing technical oversight and direction in expansions of existing data centres and the design and construction of new data centres to meet existing and future data centre needs and requirements of the bank. Prior to joining Barclays Capital, Warwick has held a variety of technology infrastructure roles in JPMorgan for the Asia Pacific region, while based in Singapore and Tokyo, covering such areas as Data Centres, Networking/Voice, Market Data Systems, Disaster Recovery, and Information Risk. Warwick has over 20 years experience working with technology in government, large IT company, and wholesale banking firms.
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