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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 9, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 23
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Special Features:
GRID TECHNOLOGY AND THE FIGHT
AGAINST SARS
By Mike Gannis, SDSC Senior Science Writer
When the medical staffs of several key hospitals in Taiwan were quarantined
by
the SARS epidemic, threatening to make a critical situation even worse,
computer scientists there, in the U.S., and throughout the Asia Pacific Rim
turned to grid computing technology and old-fashioned teamwork. PRAGMA -- the
Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly -- showed how
relationships and expertise developed to tackle computational research could
also help thousands of SARS patients in Taiwan.
PRAGMA, an international collaboration of fourteen research institutions,
was
launched at an inaugural workshop hosted by the San Diego Supercomputer Center
at UC San Diego and funded by the National Science Foundation. PRAGMA develops
grid-enabled applications and deploys high-tech infrastructure throughout the
Pacific Region, with the goal of sharing member institutions' data, computing
power, and other resources. In this case, the resource to be shared was
PRAGMA's expertise in network-based, high-performance teleconferencing.
PRAGMA Steering Committee member Fang-Pang Lin is director of the Grid
Computing Division of Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing
(NCHC), which is responsible for the national grid project of Taiwan. On May
15, he sent an e-mail to Peter Arzberger, director of the Life Sciences
Initiative at UCSD, and co-founder of PRAGMA and chair of its Steering
Committee. Dr. Lin described how the local health infrastructure was being
overwhelmed by the suddenness and severity of the outbreak. Doctors and staff
are being quarantined inside their own hospitals with SARS patients, to
prevent the spread of the disease. But the quarantines prevent attending
physicians and specialists from consulting with physicians at other
institutions. The intention of NCHC was to set up Access Grid teleconferencing
stations inside and outside of quarantined areas, enabling physicians to
communicate with one another and to share high-resolution X-rays, diagnoses,
and treatment methods.
A few hours later, the PRAGMA 4 Workshop Program Committee held a
teleconference, to discuss the seriousness of the problem and the need for
additional contributors to the fight against the outbreak of SARS. A request
for assistance was e-mailed to PRAGMA members immediately following the
teleconference.
The response was immediate. Within twelve hours, offers of assistance came
from many PRAGMA partners and other institutions around the world, and offers
of assistance have continued. These institutions included the Computer Network
Information Center (CNIC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), the Korea
Institute for Science and Technology Information (KISTI), Indiana University
and the NSF-funded TransPac project, the San Diego Supercomputer Center
(SDSC), the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, as well as
the National Biomedical Computation Resource of UCSD, the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Queensland University of Technology,
AARnet, Argonne National Laboratory and inSORS, and the California Institute
of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-(IT)2).
"We truly thank the program manager of PRAGMA, Teri Simas, for sending out
NCHC's call for Access Grid expertise in the international grid communities,"
said Grace Shau-Wei Hong, special assistant to the Grid Computing Division of
NCHC.
Arzberger independently sent the message to Rick Stevens, director of
Mathematics and Computer Science at Argonne National Laboratory and professor
at the University of Chicago, and Terry Disz, head of the collaborative tools
effort at Argonne's Futures Lab. Stevens' response was immediate and direct:
"We're on it!"
A second videoteleconference was organized by PRAGMA on May 17 involving
the
SARS Grid team at NCHC, Access Grid experts from Argonne and inSORS, and SDSC
and UCSD experts on grids and portals.
NCHC had received direct calls for assistance from the staff of the
Chang-Gung
Hospital system, who recognized NCHC's prior successes with the Asthma Grid, a
grid-based remote diagnosis for asthma patients. Three hospitals -- San-Chung
Hospital, Jen-Ai Hospital, and Chang-Gung Hospital at Linkou -- from north to
south in the greater Taipei area, had immediate need of a system for remote
diagnosis, quick access to specialized medical expertise, and a means of
sharing X-ray images, numerical instrument readings, and white board and
audio/video discussions. The system has to be scalable, since more hospitals
will join the system once its feasibility has been demonstrated and funding
and equipment become available. (See map at
sarsgrid.nchc.gov.tw/index.cgi.)
The Access Grid differs from desktop-to-desktop teleconferencing, which
targets individual communication, transmits low-quality images, and uses
ordinary telephone lines. Based on grid computing technologies and high-speed
data networks, the Access Grid supports group-to-group interactions across
high-speed networks, with large, high-res multimedia displays, advanced
interactive environments, and interfaces to Grid middleware and visualization
environments. The Access Grid typically is used for virtual workshops,
collaborative education sessions, seminars, and tutorials, and group
conferences of dozens of people at six or seven different sites are common.
"All of these capabilities made the Access Grid the logical choice for
hospitals in which entire teams of physicians need to consult," said Jer-Nan
Juang, director of NCHC.
The Access Grid itself was used to organize the virtual support team, which
includes participants from several PRAGMA member institutions. Their immediate
tasks were to provide real-time consulting expertise with Access Grid setup
and hands-on operations issues, and to expedite the response to an urgent
situation. And several urgent issues did require resolution.
Initial plans to use an Access Grid communications server in the United
States
or Australia had to be revised when it was realized that quality-of-service
issues on the data communications network made it necessary to set up and run
a local server in Taiwan. A version 1.2 Access Grid server is being procured
from inSORS Integrated Communications, Inc. of Chicago, an Access Grid
affiliate. But transportation disruptions stemming from the SARS outbreak have
delayed the arrival of this system.
A less elaborate Access Grid version 2.0 "virtual venue server" (VVS) has
been
adopted as a substitute solution, and it has been installed and tested. But
versions 2.0 and v1.2 are not compatible, and the VVS requires Access Grid
v2.0 client nodes at the hospital sites. Unfortunately, the current user
interface v2.0 is not suitable for a hospital environment. A new, high-level
user interface now is being developed by NCHC to meet hospitals' requirements.
The backup solution is to use support staff at the NCHC control center to
perform real-time manual handling of all teleconferencing sessions.
But these issues were challenges, not barriers. By May 19, the components
of
the SARS Grid prototype had been assembled in record time. Three AG nodes were
installed and tested, with a commercial (H.323) teleconferencing system
available as a backup. The dedicated network for data communications between
sites was operational. Terry Disz, Tom Uram. Ivan Judson, and Ti Leggett of
Argonne National Laboratory provided real-time assistance on Access Grid
issues. Access Grid technology development at Argonne has been supported by
DOE, NSF and Microsoft.
By May 20, the Access Grid nodes had been delivered to San-Chung and Chang-
Gung Hospitals, installed, and tested by the afternoon of May 21. The network
connection between Jen-Ai Hospital and NCHC was successfully tested on May 22,
and on May 29 the Access Grid nodes were established in Jen-Ai Hospital and in
Taiwan's CDC. A second AG node for Jen-Ai Hospital is scheduled to be
delivered on June 1, 2003. A dedicated backbone network with 1 Gbps bandwidth
has been deployed for the SARS Grid by Chung-Hwa Telecom.
Nevertheless, much more remains to be done. Eventually, a dedicated
backbone
network with 1 Gbps bandwidth will be deployed for the SARS Grid by Chung-Hwa
Telecom. The user interface issues will be overcome, permanent Access Grid
nodes will be set up, and more hospitals will be integrated into the
system.
Patients' diagnostic records of SARS need to be archived under a system
that
provides storage, retrieval, and viewing capabilities. A huge amount of data
has to be stored and accessed. One X-ray image can be digitized as between 1
and 20 megabytes of data. If 3,000 patients have at least one X-ray image per
day during 30 days of observation, then roughly 2 terabytes of storage will be
needed. It may be feasible to use PRAGMA resources, such as the SDSC Storage
Research Broker (SRB) environment at the San Diego Supercomputer Center to
provide the necessary data storage.
PRAGMA members will meet in Melbourne, Australia, on June 5-6 to review a
number of technical issues. In addition, NCHC members are expected to recount
their experiences with the SARS situation in Taiwan. Discussion topics will
include procedures for expanding the Access Grid to other Pacific Rim
institutions and the issue of how best to disseminate the lessons learned from
dealing with the SARS outbreak.
"Advanced cyberinfrastructure can assist with critical disease control and
emergency response needs," Dr. Lin said. "Thanks to PRAGMA, the alliance has
been formed. NCHC has a responsibility to assist in handling this arduous
task, and with assistance offered from the international grid community, we
believe that we can adequately contribute to the nationwide call to assist in
fighting the disease, relieving the epidemic, and ultimately save many
lives."
At this point, SARS Grid nodes have been tested and are ready to assist the
medical staff at the three hospitals. Having the SARS Grid VTC system in place
will help researchers collaborate more fully with colleagues in the Pacific
Rim region, and will encourage broader use of the Access Grid by policy makers
and government officials in emergency response situations.
For more information, please contact Mike Gannis mgannis@sdsc.edu
858-534-5143, or see:
PRAGMA -- www.pragma-grid.net/
NCHC -- www.nchc.org.tw/
SARS Grid --
sarsgrid.nchc.gov.tw/index.cgi
Access Grid -- www.accessgrid.org/
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