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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
IBM, CHINA'S MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
LAUNCH 'CHINA GRID'
IBM and China's Ministry of Education announced they have begun using Grid
technology to enable universities across the country to collaborate on
research, scientific and education projects. This is one of the world's
largest implementations of Grid computing -- which takes untapped application
service, data and computing resources from different computing systems and
makes them available where and when they're needed, resulting in a single,
virtual system.
The China Education and Research Grid -- the most ambitious Grid project by
a
government to date -- is being launched this month with six universities, and
will link more than 200,000 students and faculty members at nearly a hundred
universities across China when the project is completed. When phase one of the
project is completed in 2005, the Grid will perform more than six teraflops,
or trillions of calculations per second, and eventually will be capable of
more than 15 trillion calculations per second.
The Grid relies on new Web services technology in WebSphere -- IBM's
industry-leading Internet infrastructure software -- that exploits evolving
Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) standards. A total of 49 IBM eServer
xSeries running Linux have been deployed. It also include six units of pSeries
servers running AIX and IBM TotalStorage FAStT200 servers for storing
data.
The China Grid will simplify how students and researchers access education
and
computing resources across China. Universities will be connected to a common
virtual hub that automatically finds the appropriate application resources,
from life sciences research to video courses and e-learning.
China's university system will save on development costs since each school
can
focus on its area of expertise -- e-learning or life sciences, for example --
and tap into other applications as needed via the Grid. This is the latest
example of China's leadership in Grid computing adoption. In July, the City of
Shanghai began building a Grid, with IBM's help, to integrate information
resources spread across the city's municipal government and handle city-wide
emergency and medical services management systems.
"Grid computing, and the concept of virtualization at its core, is a key
element in building an on demand business," says Dr. George Wang, director of
IBM China Software Development Laboratory and IBM China Research and
Development Laboratory for IBM Greater China Group. "WebSphere software helps
a Grid gather untapped computing capabilities and functionalities and make it
available to users across the Grid as needed. IBM leads Grid computing in
China and around the world to help customers realize substantial business
benefit by sharing and optimizing their existing IT infrastructure using IBM
Grid computing technologies."
Among the first projects to run on the China Grid are:
- Bioinformatics: This provides an integrated platform for research
organizations to share computing and data resources and conduct complex
computational tasks such as protein structural analysis. The Bioinformatics
Grid system, a cooperative project owned by Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics,
China Ministry of Education and Tsinghua University, was used to help identify
the SARS gene and analyze similarities between different strains of the SARS
virus.
- Video courses: Peking University's Real Course application will provide
students with speedier access to video courses by distributing information
through distributed servers. Students from different universities can browse
and enroll for courses online from video information deployed at disparate
servers across the university system.
- e-learning: The University of Hong Kong e-learning application enables
students to practice Mandarin through an integrated learning portal. It offers
an easy-to-use Web interface that can verify the pronunciation of Mandarin
characters through voice recognition, and a real-time chatting service. Hong
Kong residents grow up speaking Cantonese but many began studying Mandarin
after Hong Kong rejoined mainland China.
Previously, universities in China manually wrote proprietary applications
that
were incompatible from campus to campus and could only be shared across the
university network on a limited basis. Each university developed its own suite
of applications across research and educational disciplines, resulting in
time-consuming and costly duplication of development efforts.
With the Grid built on WebSphere, China's universities can organize the
vast
computational and informational resources of its entire higher educational
system into a centralized, Internet-based hub to perform a wide range of
complex tasks instantaneously. A specific request -- such as a complex
protein-folding computation for infectious disease research - can be pushed
onto the Grid, automatically seek out an application at another campus that
knows how to handle the computation, and feed it back to the original
computer.
IBM Grid computing technology has been deployed in Peking University, South
China University of Technology, Tsinghua University, the University of Hong
Kong, Xi'an Jiaotong University and Sun Yat-sen University. The other five
universities involved in phase one of the project are Huazhong University of
Science&Technology, Northeast University, Shandong University, Shanghai
Jiaotong University and Southeast University.
IBM and the participating universities will establish a Grid Application
United R&D Center for the research and development of open Grid architecture
solutions based on open standards such as OGSA and Web services. IBM will work
closely with China's Ministry of Education on implementation, application
development and training and also teach students how to develop applications
for and manage the Grid. The Ministry of Education and universities involved
in the Grid project also will have advanced access to new Grid technologies
from IBM.
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