Content about Asia

Announcement - E-Science 2007 conference: call for papers A city of many colours, Bangalore is known as India's Silicon Valley, but has also earned a reputation as the Garden City.Stock image from sxc.huAuthors are invited to submit papers to the 3rd Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing, to be held December 10-13 in Bangalore, India.Papers are due July 15, 2007. Those who submit by the deadline will automatically have one week of extra time to upload revised versions of their papers.   Topics of interest include:Enabling Technologies: Internet and Web ServicesCollaborative Science Models and TechniquesService-Oriented Grid ArchitecturesProblem Solving EnvironmentsApplication Development EnvironmentsProgramming Paradigms and ModelsResource Management and SchedulingGrid Economy and Business ModelsAutonomic, Real-Time and Self-Organising GridsVirtual Instruments and Data Access ManagementSensor Networks and Environmental Observatories in e-ScienceSecur

Image of the week - A rising valley Rising lowland: last summer an expansion of magma pushed up an area of Hawaii’s Kilauea crater.Image courtesy of the Advanced Land Observing Satellite, JapanA section of the Kilauea volcanic crater on Hawaii Island, U.S., rose about 10 centimeters in just three months last summer. The change was due to an expanding magma reservoir, observed by the PALSAR Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar, onboard the spacecraft “Daichi”.  The image on the right uses colors to show the degree of the diastrophism, or land change, observed. Warm colors show a reduction in the distance between the satellite and the land, indicating that the land has risen; cold colors show an increase in this distance, indicating subsided land.PALSAR is one of three remote-sensing instruments on Japan’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite. Images such as these are produced using data grid and computing grid technology as part of the Global Earth Observation Grid framework. Such images, comb

Image of the Week - Science on Top of the World  Scared of heights? Don't look down. And don't get too excited about all those gamma rays and start hyperventilating: the partial pressure of oxygen at this laboratory is about half that at sea level.Image courtesy of EUChinaGRIDBeing 4,300 meters above sea level brings you closer not only to the stars, but also to the things stars spit out: gamma rays. For researchers eager to detect these gamma rays before the rays are absorbed by the atmosphere, this is a good place to be, or at least, it is a good place to put your equipment. In Tibet, 90 kilometers north of Lhasa, sits the High Altitude Cosmic Ray Laboratory. The lab, run by a Chinese-Italian collaboration, will use the EUChinaGRID infrastructure to store and transfer data so it can be accessed by collaborators around the world.EUChinaGRID expects to transfer 250 terabytes a year to Beijing, and then on to Italy, at the steady rate of around 10 megabytes per second.

  Feature - Taiwan’s Tier-1 Connects Asian-PacificThe Academia Sinica Grid Computing team in front of the Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.Image courtesy of ASGCTaiwan may be small, but its contribution to the global grid effort is increasingly large. This is the message of Simon Lin, Project Director of Academia Sinica Grid Computing, the dedicated grid computing center of Taiwan’s most influential academic research institution.Taiwan’s ASGC already plays a pivotal role: since December 2005 it has functioned as a Tier-1 Center for the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, or WLCG, making it one of only eleven such centers around the globe. Tier-1 centers like the ASGC are responsible not only for maintaining their own operations, but also those of the many Tier-2 centers that depend on their services. In the case of the ASGC, these Tier-2s are becoming increasingly far-flung.“We coordinate around 20 sites across the Asia-Pacific, and we’re keen to bring the entire Asia-

Feature - Pacific Rim Researchers Collaborate to Study Avian Flu Nations with confirmed cases of the H5N1 avian influenza as of February 2007.Source http://pandemicflu.govResearchers at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Hawaii will use bioinformatics, grid computing and networking infrastructure, as well as collaborative ties to Asian institutions, to learn more about avian flu, in hopes of helping to head off a much-feared pandemic in the region of the world where the disease has already cost human lives.“We will use modern high-throughput biology to annotate the biological structures of different subtypes of the avian influenza virus, at the same time as we study their variations,” said principal investigator Peter Arzberger, director of Life Science Initiatives at UC San Diego. “We will also construct a grid infrastructure to support avian flu research—an infrastructure that could one day handle research on other infectious diseases as well.”“Fighting a pandemic will

Feature - Widening the Gateway to India The “Gateway to India” in Mumbai. By typing in a simple command on Monday 12 February 2007, Gavin McCance initiated the first file transfer between CERN and India on the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. Connection via the WLCG will give Indian researchers the same level of access to Large Hadron Collider particle physics experiments as researchers in European or North American countries. “It’s a good feeling to be involved in a collaboration like this,” says McCance,  of the WLCG and CERN. The file transfer, containing one gigabyte of test data, reached India in less then seven minutes and represents the first drop of an imminent deluge on the WLCG transfer service. Once the CERN Large Hadron Collider is generating particle physics data, the WLCG, which runs on EGEE and Open Science Grid infrastructures, will be needed to manage and process the files. Since the amount of data generated will be larger than one institution could handle, the task of storing a

Feature: Building Japan’s Grid The Institute for Molecular Science helps nanoscience researchers use NAREGI grid technology. This image shows a chemical reaction between solute molecules in water. Institute for Molecular Science NAREGI, Japan’s National Research Grid Initiative, started in 2003 as a project to develop grid middleware and prove the technology’s usefulness to scientific communities and the business world. More recently, NAREGI’s goals have expanded to include supporting two nationwide computing infrastructures. “NAREGI’s grid middleware is one of the key component technologies for the Japanese Cyber Science Infrastructure framework,” explains NAREGI Project Leader Kenichi Miura. “We will also provide the infrastructure for access and data sharing within the Petascale computing system when it becomes available in 2010.” Both the Cyber Science Infrastruct