Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good morning

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the BioGrid Computing Symposium 2001.

The growing popularity of the Internet along with the availability of powerful computers and high-speed networks as low-cost commodity components are changing the way we do computing. In 1997, Singapore connected to the high performance network infrastructure Internet2 through the STARTAP (Science, Technology, And Research Transit Access Point) in USA. Singapore was the first country in Asia and the second country in the world to connect up. Since then, we have enough high performance second generation Internet connectivity through our own Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SINGAREN).

These new network infrastructure and technologies enable the clustering of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources, such as supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, and special devices, that can then be used as a unified resource and thus form what are popularly known as "Computational Grids".

In 1997, Singapore became one of the key founders of the APAN the Asia Pacific Advanced Network. Singapore is also the founding secretariat of the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network, One of the earliest joint APAN-APBioNet projects was to create a network of biological mirror sites of key genomic database resources in the Asia Pacific region. In this way, we were able to build a cluster of geographically distributed data resource for the common good of life science researchers in our region.

In 1998 and 1999, the Bioinformatics Centre in Singapore participated in Supercomputing '98 and '99 in demonstrating biological computational grid computing with University of Indiana on a distributed phylogenetic analysis project.

By 2000, we were able to solve a three-dimensional crystal structure of the bucandin Malayan Krait snake toxin protein by using the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory remotely from Singapore.

Thus, this Grid which we are talking about, has enabled us to merge databases and datasources, compute servers, remote sophisticated devices such as synchrotrons, into a unified bio-resource for the benefit of not just our country, but also for the entire region.

The Grid is analogous to the electrical power grid. Its aims to couple distributed resources and offer consistent and inexpensive access to resources irrespective of their physical location, has seen a good start in Singapore and our Region.

What we need to do now is to move forward in an integrated and coherent manner, by systematically pulling together our talented pool of manpower and get researchers of many different disciplines to come together and discuss how we can work together and share such resources for mutual benefit.

It is my pleasure to see that through BioGRID '01 that we are indeed beginning to gather computer scientist and computational biologists, bioinformaticians and biochemists, microbiologists and mechanical engineers, all under one roof, to sit down and find a language that we can all understand, and start talking and working out a road map to spearhead the future of GRID computing for the life sciences.

We in the Nanyang Technological University are most pleased to be joint organisers of this symposium with the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network and the National University of Singapore. My staff have been tasked to set up a new bioinformatics centre in the university to carry out multidisciplinary projects such as those that will be presented here today. To train a new generation of bioinformaticians, NTU is planning to set up a new Graduate Programme in Bioinformatics, scheduled to take in students early next year for the July 2002 intake. We plan to collaborate with the Bioinformatics Institute (BII) set up by the National Science of Technology Board, APBioNet and the Bioinformatics Centre of NUS to boost our entry into life sciences informatics, and rapidly set up our own capability in this new area.

I am pleased to note that there is a strong interest in Singapore in this new exciting research frontier. I am sure that the cooperation and interaction amongst researchers in the universities and research institutes with industry such as Sun Microsystems will lead to cross-disciplinary ideas and innovation. In strategic tie-ups like this, all partners bring with them valuable know-how, expertise, wealth of experiences and new perspectives. Our research community can certainly benefit significantly from such alliances. I wish you a fruitful and exciting meeting, and declare this symposium open.

Thank you.