A Grid computing system based on .NET has won an award from Microsoft.
Bayanihan Computing .NET, a generic Grid computing framework that uses Web services to enable PCs to act as a virtual supercomputer, was developed at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. It won for best academic solution, one of seven winners of the new Microsoft .NET Best Awards, which recognize XML Web services developers who best utilize .NET Web services standards such as XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI to deliver business value.
The team from Ateneo de Manila University sees .NET as a tool for tapping the computing power of idle PCs on the Internet and turning them into a "poor man's supercomputer," reducing the time it takes to do calculations and simulations from months or years to mere hours or minutes, Microsoft said. Led by Luis Sarmenta, undergraduate students Stanley Tan, Sacha Chua, Paul Echevarria, Russell Santos and Joey Mendoza used .NET to write a PoolService Web service that receives computational jobs from users and spreads the work across many "worker" machines, such as the university's hundreds of idle PCs.
The Philippine students have also demonstrated the idea of computational Web services - .NET Web services that take requested tasks from users and do the computation in a parallel method behind the scenes. Sarmenta envisions numerous applications for this type of service, including 3-D graphics, scientific simulations and financial forecasting.
"Since these Web services are accessible from mobile devices and do not require the user to know about parallel processing, they quite literally bring supercomputing into the hands of ordinary users," Sarmenta said.
The Microsoft .NET Best Awards were judged by an expert panel that included executives from Internosis, Cactus Internet, Polaris Group and Trinity Expert Systems. Judging criteria included quantified business value to Web service users, developer productivity or time to market, best use of XML Web service technologies in each category, and compliance with Web service standards.
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