Content about Asia

  Feature - Building BRIDGEs between Europe and China The BRIDGE project includes three case studies of interoperation between Chinese and European middleware, covering aerodynamics, meteorology and pharmaceuticals.Images courtesy the BRIDGE project Grid middleware has become a pervasive e-science technology and Chinese middleware is no exception, with technologies such as CNGrid GOS and CROWN Grid contributing to e-science efforts across the globe.Yet one of the remaining challenges in grid computing is interoperability, and more sustainable international co-operation must be accomplished to align middleware developments on a global scale.The EU ICT BRIDGE project (Transcontinental Workflows for Simulation, Engineering, and Design on heterogeneous Grid Platforms) is addressing these challenges using three case studies of interoperation between Chinese middleware CNGrid GOS and European middleware GRIA in the aerospace, meteorology and pharmaceutical sectors.Protein docking for disease controlThe first case study is a distrib

Announcement - Applications due March 30: Anita Borg Systers “Pass it on” grants These grants are called “Pass-It-On” grants because they come with the moral obligation to “pass on” the benefits gained from the grant. They are intended as means for women established in technological fields to support women seeking their place in the fields of technology.Image courtesy of the Anita Borg InstituteThe Anita Borg Institute Systers Online Community is offering a series of “Pass-It-On” Grants to honor Anita Borg’s desire to create a network of technical women helping one another.Applications are due 30 March 2008.Who can apply? The grants are open to any woman over 18 years old in or aspiring to be in the fields of computing. Grants are open to women in all countries and range from $500 to $1000.Applications covering a wide variety of needs and projects are encouraged, such as:Small grant to help with studies, job transfers or other transitions in lifeA broader project that b

Announcement -  Early bird registration closes 15 February: Advances in Computer Science and Technology 2008 This year’s ACST conference will be held in Langkawi, Malaysia, at the Meritus Pelangi Beach Resort.Images courtesy of IASTED  Early bird registration for the 4th IASTED International Conference on Advances in Computer Science and Technology, to be held 2-4 April 2008 in Langkawi, Malaysia, is available until 15 February 2008. After this time late registration fees will apply.Registration includes the dinner banquet and entertainment on 3 April 2008 as well as all keynote addresses, tutorials and special sessions.The program includes a keynote on information extraction from massive data sets, as well as sessions on nature-inspired algorithms, computational intelligence in industrial management, emerging computer technologies for virtual instrumentation and more.Join the IASTED Technical CommitteeThose interested in joining the IASTED Technical Committee or any of the technical committees related to this c

  Opinion - Five years on: the Asia Pacific in the global grid Author Simon Lin at the recent EGEE conference in Budapest Hungary. Image courtesy of TWGrid Around five years ago, we first began to realize that grid middleware and toolkits alone are insufficient to achieve the vision of grid computing. For success, we must focus on deployment, taking advantage of user needs—such as the needs of the high energy physics community and the Large Hadron Collider—to drive a production infrastructure. On 4 October 2002, the Grid Deployment Board of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid held their first meeting in Milano, Italy. The meeting was chaired by Mirco Mazzucato and included 26 participants as well as WLCG project leader Les Robertson, computing coordinators from the four LHC experiments, and numerous country representatives. At this inaugural meeting, this group discussed the goal of providing a common production infrastructure on which to run experimental data challenges: the result was the LCG-1. The collaboration

Announcement - Call for papers: WaGe08, 25-28 January, Kunming, China Image courtesy of GPC 2008The 3rd International Workshop on Workflow Management and Applications in Grid Environments (WaGe08), held 25-28 May 2008 in Kunming, China, is calling for papers. The deadline for papers is 10 January 2008.Workshop papers will be published by IEEE CS in the conference proceedings. Selected papers will be published by a special issue in Journal of Computer and System Sciences.The workshop will be held in conjunction with the 3rd International Conference on Grid and Pervasive Computing (GPC 2008). 

Announcement - International Science Grid This Week celebrates one year iSGTW continues to cover the truly international effort behind grid computing.Image courtesy of GridPP, OSG and EGEEOn 14 November 2007 International Science Grid This Week will celebrate its one-year anniversary. Now with more than 3400 subscribers, iSGTW attracted over 70,000 visitors during October, an almost six-fold increase over the last six months. A collaboration between Open Science Grid in the U.S. and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE in Europe, iSGTW promotes the success of grid computing as a tool for scientists and researchers.Able to complete in minutes what might take an average PC many months, grid computing offers scientists a new level of computing power, allowing them to delve deeper in to research questions with big answers. Grid computing works by coordinating the power of ordinary computing resources, linking this power into massive multifunctional computing “grids.”Scientists are using grid computing to fight disease, develop n

  Announcement - IEEE T-ASE special issue on Scientific Workflow Management and Applications IEEE Transactions on Automation Science Engineering is calling for papers for a special issue on Scientific Workflow Management and Applications.Image courtesy of IEEE T-ASE IEEE Transactions on Automation Science Engineering is calling for papers for a special issue on Scientific Workflow Management and Applications, to be published in July 2009.Paper submissions are due 31 March 2008, with final manuscripts due 15 January 2009. Original and unpublished high-quality research results are solicited to explore and boost the new area. The special issue aims to systematically investigate and shape the special features, challenges and new techniques of scientific workflows, as well as corresponding applications and underlying computing infrastructures.  Topics for contributions include, but are not limited to:Special features of scientific workflows and their hints on new techniquesScientific workflow modeling, execution and scheduli

  Feature - Open Grid Forum maintains focus on the 2010 goal Grids are about scaling IT, and community organizations such as Open Grid Forum are essential to guiding and managing this growth process, says John Ehrig, Open Grid Forum enterprise and marketing program manager.Images courtesy of Open Grid Forum Now involving more than 300 organizations from 50 countries, the Open Grid Forum community has gathered at this week's OGF21 to continue progress towards grids standards development. Open Grid Forum Enterprise and Marketing Program Manager, John Ehrig, explains the goals and progress of this community-initiated not-for-profit organization.Driven by accelerating globalization, organizations and individuals are being challenged to work in new ways—often across departments, disciplines and large geographical areas. Technology silos that inhibit the flow of information, innovation and commerce are being broken apart and rebuilt to better serve this new business paradigm. Grid and grid-like technologies—including

  Feature - Europe and China working together to optimize network layer The EC-GIN team, pictured here at a July 2007 conference in Greece, are working to develop tailored network technology in dedicated support of grid applications. Image courtesy of EC-GINThe Internet communication infrastructure—the TCP/IP protocol stack—is designed for broad use and as such does not account for the specific characteristics of grid applications.This one-size-fits-all approach works for a number of application domains; however, it is far from optimal and is not as efficient as customized solutions. While grid technologies and services are slowly coming of age, the corresponding network infrastructure is still in its infancy. In an effort to change this, Europe and China are working together to improve the network’s ability to support grid applications and services. Called the Europe-China Grid InterNetworking project, or EC-GIN, the project aims at developing a tailored network technology in dedicated support of grid appl

Image of the week - European Grid Initiative steps out with EGEE crowd Delegates from the EGEE ’07 conference are enjoying a packed program of sessions covering grid operations, applications, security, interoperability, middleware and more. The European Grid Initiative Design Study workshop attracted many and marked a concrete step towards realization of the EGI project.Images courtesy of Toth Csilla This week’s EGEE ’07 conference attracted more than 600 delegates and it felt like most of them attended Tuesday’s workshop on the status of the European Grid Initiative. The room was bulging before the session had even started. When Dieter Kranzlmüller of Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, opened proceedings with an overview of the EGI Design Study (EGI_DS) project, he was speaking to an audience straining to see more.Vision for a pan-European grid infrastructureThis first EGI_DS workshop marked a very concrete step towards realization of the EGI project: an endeavor that has already garnered the

  Feature - ATLAS: the data chain works Tracks recorded in the muon chambers of the ATLAS detector can now be expressed to physicists all over the world, enabling simultaneous analysis at sites across the globe. The European and U.S. sites are connected via the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE and Open Science Grid infrastructures.Image courtesy of ATLAS This month particle physics experiment ATLAS went “end-to-end” for the first time. Buried in Switzerland, 90 meters under the ground at the base of the French Jura mountains, ATLAS (A Torroidal LHC ApparatuS) is one of four high energy physics experiments attached to the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer particle accelerator nearing the final stages of completion.When the LHC is turned on, physicists worldwide will be waiting by their computers. They’ll be expecting express and non-stop delivery of massive amounts of data, streamed in a virtually seamless sequence direct to their doorstep.And this month, for the first time, ATLAS proved that this data dist

  Feature - Thailand goes tera: scientists connect to the power of ThaiGrid ThaiGrid powers this tsunami simulation, run by a team from Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and focusing on the potential effects of tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.Image courtesy of ThaiGrid Scientists across the globe are cranking up their computing requirements: they want more processing power to tackle ever more challenging problems. The wishes of Thai scientists recently came true when their first teraflop computing system went online as part of the Thai National Grid Project.“Our demand for computational power and storage is increasing rapidly,” says Putchong Uthayopas, director of the Thai National Grid Project. “We had a need for a national computational infrastructure that would allow researchers to discover and explore more challenging problems,” he says. “The Thai government decided that now was the right time to explore grids as a key infrastructure enabler.”80 systems across 15 sites Comprising 1