Content about Asia

Feature - On a grid and a prayer

Predictect rainfall in cm (color scale) over the Indonesian island of Java and part of Sumatra. Magnitude and strength of the wind at ten meters about the ground is also shown.

In Indonesia, weather forecasts powered by grid computing are being distributed twice a day using Google Maps, along with Imsakiyah, the calendar of Muslim prayer times as well as an earthquake update.
Because Indonesia straddles the equator, the temperature is roughly constant all year round — typically a balmy 28°C in coastal regions. So, the most interesting part of a weather forecast is usually how much rain it predicts.
There are often torrential rains between December and March, when the monsoon winds blow from the north and west, while some parts of the country suffer drought when dry air blows north from the Australian continent, between June and September.
Predicting local rainfall is, however, a tricky business, as sudden tropical storms are a typic

Feature - Computing a way out of poverty

In northwest Bangladesh, 72% of the population live below the poverty line, according to the Asian Development Bank. Photo here and on front page courtesy of ADB and Eric Sales, from an ADB Photo Essay entitled New Hope for Bangladesh’s Extreme Poor. 

In the Philippines, the Asian Development Bank and grid specialists are getting together to figure out best investment strategies for Asia’s poorest regions.
One of the outcomes of the EUAsiaGrid Project, funded by the European Commission under Framework Program 7, has been to spark new grid-based collaborations in Southeast Asia.
One example is the result of a meeting that occurred last October, when representatives from EUAsiaGrid partners went to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Headquarters in Manila, The Phillipines, to explore ways to model the impact of poverty alleviation investments that ADB makes.
In the past, investments by development banks such as the ADB and the

Feature - Sixty seconds to save a city

Circles indicate warning times for the earthquake that hit Taiwan on 4 March 2010, using a new approach to detection that gives up to 40 seconds more early warning. Taipei is the northernmost city indicated on the map, on the 50 second circle. Image courtesy Nai-Chi Hsiao, Central Weather Bureau, Taiwan.

At the International Symposium on Grid Computing (ISGC 2010) in Taipei last week, a special two-day EUAsiaGrid Disaster Mitigation Workshop devoted a day to the latest technological progress in monitoring and simulating earthquakes and tsunamis. In a situation where every second counts, grid computing could one day help authorities assess the potential impact of an earthquake quickly enough to avoid the worst consequences.
 
The day before ISGC 2010 began, Taiwan was hit by a magnitude 6.4 earthquake in the south part of the island, making headlines worldwide.
But earthquakes are a daily reality for Taiwan’s inhabitants, and indeed

Feature - Dealing with dengue

Close-up of the Aedis aegypti mosquito that carries dengue. Image courtesy Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

First, you get a bad headache. Then your joints feel like they are being crushed. This is followed by fever and a bright red rash on your legs and chest. You may also start vomiting or have diarrhea. This is dengue fever, and it affects two-fifths of the planet’s population. Thanks to the EUAsiaGrid project, grid technology is doing its part to help reduce the burden of this devastating disease.
For most, dengue fever passes after a very unpleasant week, but for some it leads to dengue haemorrhagic fever, which is often fatal. Like malaria, dengue is borne by mosquitoes. Unlike malaria, though, it affects people in cities as much as in the countryside. As a result, it has a particularly high incidence in heavily populated parts of South–East Asia, where it is a significant source of infant mortality in several countrie

Link of the Week: GridCast, live from Taipei

Gridcast bloggers take you live, behind the scenes at ISGC 2010. Image courtesy Gridcast

All this week, GridCast, the blog that takes you behind the scenes of some of the most exciting events in grid computing, will be coming to you live from Taipei in Taiwan, where we’re at  ISGC 2010.
This year ISGC (International Symposium on Grid Computing), organized by TWGrid, is focusing on data driven e-Science.
With plenty of use cases and scenarios there’ll be a lot to blog about!
We’ve put together a team of bloggers from around the world to bring you the latest news and views right from Taipei. From blog posts on sessions, to photos of speakers and videos of demos, you’ll feel like your right here with us!
So head on over to the GridCast website to check out what’s going on...
—Manisha Lalloo, GridTalk

Feature - Vietnam welcomes three new grid sites; hospitals get new ‘HOPE’

Participants from ACGRID school at Institute for Francophone Informatics (IFI) in Hanoi, October 2009. Image courtesy ACGRID. Image of Vietnamese flag on front page courtesy Wikipedia/Creative Commons

Vietnam hosts some of the world’s most biodiverse areas — with six biosphere reserves — along with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the third world and, as of last month, three of the newest grid sites to join the world’s largest grid computing infrastructure.EUAsiaGrid was launched in April of 2008 to foster grid computing technology within Asia, and to create ties between the e-Infrastructure communities of Asia and Europe. Last month, EUAsiaGrid partners co-organized with the French research institute Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) the second ACGRID school, or Advanced Computing and Grid Technologies for Research, to train current and up

Feature - The digital story behind the mask

Mak Yong dancer in a 3D body scanner. Courtesy Info Com Development Centre (IDeC) of Universiti putra Malaysia.

Capturing culture in digital form can lead to impressive demands for storage and processing. And grid technology has a role to play in providing those resources. For instance, a 10-minute recording of the movements of a Malay dancer performing the classical Mak Yong dance, using motion-capture equipment attached to the dancer’s body, can take over a week to render into a virtual 3D image of the dancer using a single desktop computer. Once this is done, though, every detail of the dance movement is permanently digitized, and hence preserved for posterity.
The problem, though, is that a complete Mak Yong dance carried out for ceremonial purposes could last a whole night, not just ten minutes. Rendering and storing all the data necessary for this calls for grid computing.
Faridah Noor, an associate professor at the University of

Announcement – Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research workshop deadlines approach

Registration and abstract submission deadlines for the next Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research workshop (ACAT) are fast approaching.
The workshop is scheduled to take place 22-27 February 2010 in Jaipur, India, a five hour drive from New Delhi. This year’s slogan is, “Beyond the cutting edge in computing.” There will be a fair amount of discussion of distributed computing – on the event website’s front page, they mention the potential clouds have to change the way we do science.

“…all levels of virtualisation imagined till now seem to be possible via Clouds, and possibly many more. Information Technology has been the working backbone of the Global Village, and now, in more than one sense, it is becoming itself the Global Village. Between these two, the gap between the need for adapting applications to exploit

Feature - Academia Sinica watches global carbon

Chi-Lan Flux Tower is located on one of the long-term ecological research sites in Taiwan, in the northeast part of the island and close to Yuan-Yang Lake nature preserve. At 1400 - 1800 m above sea level, the area of the Chi-Lan Mountain site covers approximately 310 hectares, with a high frequency of fog and cloud year-round. The climate is temperate, heavy and moist, and the trees are mainly Taiwan Cypress. Image courtesy Jia-ying Jiang, Chi-Lan Mountain
Front page: Polarized light reveals the state of the atmosphere thousands of years ago, in a slice of glacial ice containing bubbles of atmospheric gases trapped eons ago. Image courtesy UCAR

With the help of data standards and computing resources, Academia Sinica Grid Computing Center (ASGC) has developed an innovative, grid-enabled approach to tackle carbon flux observation.
The carbon cycle — in which the carbon from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) travels fro

Opinion - The age of citizen cyberspace

Using LHC@home, particle beam dynamics can be studied with volunteer computing. Image courtesy CERN

(François Grey, one of the key people behind the founding of the present-day iSGTW and a frequent contributor to these pages, argues that with volunteer computing, we are about to embark upon a new era of “citizen science.”)
I first met Rytis Slatkevicius in 2006, when he was 18. At the time, he had assembled the world’s largest database of prime numbers — those which are only divisible by themselves and one.
He had done this by harnessing the spare processing power of computers belonging to thousands of prime-number enthusiasts, using the internet. 
Today, Rytis is a mild-mannered MBA student by day and an avid prime-number sleuth by night. His project, called PrimeGrid, is tackling a host of numerical challenges, such as finding the longest arithmetic progression of prime numbers (the current record is 25). P

Feature - Volunteer computing against childhood cancer

Image courtesy of WCG.

Researchers from the Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute and Chiba University in Japan are launching a new World Community Grid project with IBM to discover a drug treatment for neuroblastoma, the most common cause of death in children with solid tumors. Help Fight Childhood Cancer, as the project is known, uses idle computational power from volunteers’ home and office computers to identify promising drug candidates.Most physicians believe that neuroblastoma is caused by accidental cell growth that occurs during normal development of the sympathetic ganglia and adrenal glands. This condition occurs most often the first two years of life, and poses a high risk for disease relapse with survival rates under 40 percent.The new Help Fight Childhood Cancer project uses volunteered computational power to identify which of the three million potential drug candidates prohibit growth of three proteins, TrkB, AL

Feature - Peking University advances protein research

At top: Superimposition of 20 structures of hPHPT1. At bottom: Ribbon diagram of the mean structure of hPHPT1. Red: alpha-helix, blue: beta-sheet, white: random coil. Image courtesy of Weibin Gong

Researchers at Peking University’s Beijing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center (BNMRC) can determine 3D protein structures 1000 times faster, thanks to the grid. 
Function follows form in the protein world, so their work contributes to scientists’ understanding of the roles that individual proteins play. This in turn should lead to advances in drug discovery and health care.The Peking University team uses Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to determine protein structures. NMR works well, but the calculations involved are time-consuming and computationally demanding. Scientists have so far learned the structure of only about 50,000 proteins out of the millions that exist in nature.
The Peking team has calculat