Microsoft to sponsor new Masters at the University of Melbourne

Media Release, Friday 5 August 2005

Microsoft will sponsor the establishment of a new ‘.NET Lab’ for the University of Melbourne’s recently launched Master of Engineering in Distributed Computing – believed to be the first of its kind in the world.

The Director of the University’s Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) laboratory, Dr Rajkumar Buyya says that graduates of the Masters program are likely to be in great demand as the technology continues to expand.

“The past few years has seen growing interest in the field of distributed computing and grid technology, which enables users to access resources through a virtual network of computer applications,” Dr Buyya says.

“Grids are seen as the next generation of internet and web applications where, rather than buying or building a supercomputer or advanced facility, individuals or businesses can borrow from the Grid network.”

University relations manager from Microsoft Research Asia, Mr John Warren says the sponsorship includes US$20,000 to help set up the .NET Lab.

“Microsoft believes that distributed computing will become increasingly important over the next few years and we are happy to support some of the world’s first Masters graduates in this new field of computer science,” he says.

In addition, Mr Pradeepa de Silva, academic manager, Microsoft Australia and New Zealand has offered resource kits containing three books on Microsoft .Net and distributed computing and two CDs containing useful software tools for all students enrolled in the course.

Students will also have free access to Microsoft software which they will be able to install on their own personal computers and laptops.

In addition, Microsoft has offered to sponsor prizes for the top performing Masters students which are: a smartphone for first place, a Creative Zen Portable Music Player for second place and Office 2003, a wireless keyboard and mouse for third place. Trophies will also be awarded to the top students.

Dr Buyya and his team recently launched a new enterprise grid technology called Alchemi (www.alchemi.net), which works on Microsoft’s .NET platform. Alchemi is developed as part of the Gridbus Project (www.gridbus.org) creating utility grid technologies to power emerging e-Science and e-Business applications.

The Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) for Biomedical Research in Switzerland has already used Alchemi in their distributed bioinformatics research that helps in identification of patterns of transcription factors in the regulatory regions of mammalian genes.

“Previously the program we used took hours to complete its searches, but by farming out the tasks in parallel on an Alchemi enterprise grid, we can now complete the analysis in only a few seconds,” says Dr Edward Oakeley, Head of Functional Genomics at the FMI, part of the Novartis Research Foundation in Basel Switzerland.

The Melbourne team are one of the first to develop grid systems using a .NET framework in a Windows environment, which will make it far more accessible to individuals and companies.

In addition, the Alchemi user community is working with the Melbourne team to make it also available on other platforms such as Mono, which is believed to be a .NET compliant platform for Linux-based systems. A number of organisations in Australia, Brazil, Europe, India, and the US have started using Alchemi grid technology in their enterprise computing applications.

“Gridbus technology developed in Australia is sure to assist the world in delivering Grid services as the fifth utility to homes after the first four fundamental utilities—water, power, gas and telephones,” Dr Buyya says.

“I believe that the Gridbus we are developing will eventually become the fifth essential utility.”