DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 16, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 24    ( Table of Contents )

Special Features:

AUSTRALIA DEMOS GRID COMPUTING PROTOTYPE

Researchers from four Australian universities have created a prototype for a data grid, an IBM media release says.

The Australian Belle Data Grid testbed was demonstrated by researchers from Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney universities and the Australian National University in Canberra at a Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) workshop in Melbourne today.

The workshop was held as part of the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS). PRAGMA has 13 member institutions based in the Pacific Rim, whose mission is to establish sustained collaborations and advance the use of grid technologies in advanced scientific applications.

IBM has provided the project team with four industry standard Intel processor- based IBM eServers, which are located in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Canberra, along with technical personnel with skills in Globus open source grid implementation.

Linking computers through grids to aggregate their power can deliver the immense processing capabilities of supercomputers to new venues beyond scientific and technical computing.

Lyle Winton, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne's school of physics was quoted as saying one of the main motivations for grid computing was large scientific experiments that require sharing of large data sets and computational resources by hundreds of researchers distributed around the world.

"Belle is a large high-energy physics experiment undertaken at the KEK particle accelerator in Tsukuba, Japan. It involves 400 scientists from 50 institutions around the world, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region. It is similar to the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), except that it is smaller in scale and is already running - and has produced terabytes of data," Winton said.

He said the project aimed to demonstrate that data grid infrastructure and open source software tools - such as Nimrod-G and Gridbus developed by Australian researchers - could be used to automate much of the generation, storage and analysis of Belle data that is done manually.

"After the demonstration, we expect to begin gradual roll-out of the system to many of the institutions involved in the Belle collaboration. By the end of the year we hope to have a large-scale data grid with many sites throughout the Asia-Pacific region," Winton said.

The researchers say the Belle data grid will also serve as a prototype of a general data grid infrastructure (software and hardware) for Australia.

Andrew McDougall, director, IBM Systems Group, Australia and New Zealand, said businesses may be able to improve use of their technology infrastructures by 30 percent or more by taking advantage of grid technologies to enable on- demand computing.