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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
SUN MICROSYSTEMS HELPS SET UP GRID
COMPUTING LAB IN TAIWAN
Engineers and researchers have for many years dreamed of a world in which
people could share immense computing power and data storage to improve the way
they work.
Sun Microsystems Inc and National Central University (NCU) moved to realize
that dream by establishing Taiwan's first Grid computing laboratory.
Grid, or distributed, computing emerged about five years ago and links
hundreds or even thousands of computers to enable the sharing, selection and
aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational
resources. The technology aims to provide vast computing power or data storage
to companies who pay only for what they use.
"So far, Grid computing is mostly applied to the research domain -- such as
civil engineering, the environment and such things -- but I'm sure it will be
used in commercial computing in the next few years," Dinesh Bahal, director of
Sun's global education and research in the Asia-Pacific region, said at a
signing ceremony. "In short, it will change our way of working and doing
business."
For the first three years of the cooperation, Sun and NCU will pump in
NT$100
million in the Grid Computing Center.
The center will initially be used in NCU research projects for space remote
sensing, optics, environment, communication systems and nanotechnology, said
Chiang Wei-ling, a civil engineering professor at NCU who will supervise the
center.
NTC also plans to invite institutions including National Tsing Hua
University
and National Chiao Tung University to participate in research, Chiang
said.
"I think the cooperation will make us one of the world's top 500
universities
in the high-performance computing field," he said.
Sun already has joined several other institutes -- including the University
of
California-San Diego, the University of Ulm in Germany and the High
Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory in Canada -- to develop Grid
computing technology.
"Grid computing is the most influential information technology in this
century," said Alan Chang, general manager of Sun Microsystems Taiwan.
"Currently, the utility rate of workstations, storage facilities and servers
on the Internet is 5 percent to 20 percent on average, and with Grid
computing, it will drive up the rate to 98 percent, which will help to resolve
a lot of complicated computing in a short time."
A pioneer in the field is SETI@home, a never-ending search for signs of
life
from space that began in the 1990s. The program uses idle computers to process
data picked up by radiotelescopes.
Another example is the IBM/Oxford eDiamond project in Britain, which is a
part
of the government's "e-science initiative," helping doctors detect and treat
breast cancer with five hospitals or screening centers sharing a Grid.
In 2002 in Taiwan, IBM Corp, Academia Sinica and National Yang-Ming
University
built a biotechnology research center powered by Grid computing provided by
IBM. The Grid connected seven biological institutions with a goal to expand
the Grid to more than 100 within three years.
IBM signed a similar research pact with National Cheng Kung University last
year.
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