Australia, China, United Kingdom Come Together via Grid

A research project created through the efforts of Curtin Business School (CBS, (Perth, Australia)) and Sun Microsystems has formed a computing Grid linking three continents.

The Grid is part of the INWA (Innovation Node: Western Australia) Grid project, which is investigating the suitability of existing Grid technologies for secure, commercial data mining. The project underscores the notion that sharing and collaboration in technology can result in tremendous gains for network computing.

The three-continent Grid links computers at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center (EPCC) in the United Kingdom, Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia (WA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Sun Microsystems SPARC technology is being used in all three nodes of the Grid, which is the first of its type and also the longest Grid in the world.

Grids Across the World

“This is the first time that such a Grid computing link has been established between three continents,” said professor Ashley Lloyd, the SingTel Optus Chair of Electronic Business within Curtin Business School.

Professor Lloyd said that the link-up was achieved after initial network routing instabilities between Australia and China were identified and solved by AARNet, Australia’s Academic and Research Network.

“With Sun Microsystems hardware and AARNet’s assistance, we were able to link up an existing UK-Australia Grid with one of China’s most powerful computing facilities. This is the location that runs one of China’s largest computers as well as the .cn internet domain,” said Lloyd.

Grid computing involves linking computers across organizations and around the world, utilizing the increased computing power to analyze very large amounts of organizational data.

Data mining information is of increasing value for large organizations. It can be used by a company in the commercial sense, for example, to predict customer trends, develop new products and better meet customer needs.

“In many cases, it is only the data held by large commercial organizations that provides statistically significant samples of patterns of behavior in society for us to use in these research projects,” said Lloyd.

According to Lloyd, linking up with China is particularly significant because it gives companies the potential to better analyze customer behavior in vast, emerging markets.

“We’re demonstrating that it is possible with Grid computing to collect high quality data on behavior within markets.

“With the Grid we can then focus the analytical expertise of subject specialists and deliver on-demand computing power to build the sophisticated models required by organizations developing products and services for their markets,” said Lloyd.

“As Grids move from the scientific domain to enterprise environments, they will need to deliver enterprise class characteristics, particularly in areas such as security,” said Angus MacDonald, chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems Australasia.

“A Grid of this scale drives home the importance of standards-based computing. As we move from the Information Age into the Participation Age, Grids such as this will become the cornerstone of commercial and social collaboration,” said MacDonald.

Sun support makes it happen Linking to China was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council in an extension of a project at The University of Edinburgh Management School, which has been running a Grid between WA and Edinburgh since 2003.

“China is an exciting market because its economy is growing at a faster rate than contemporary markets such as the [United States] and Europe,” said Lloyd.

Professor Lloyd’s own relationship with Sun extends back to 1993. It was at this time that Sun donated resources to his early work on the World Wide Web at The University of Edinburgh Management School.

Sun has more recently also donated SPARC-based equipment and resources to Curtin and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Perth — Gateway to the World

Perth is particularly well placed to sit at the center of Grid projects — being in the same time zone as China and with many other parts of Asia.

“Most of the global economy’s growth is happening in this location, with upwards of 2 billion people in the same time zone,” said Lloyd, noting that the response to the project from Chinese and Australian business has been extremely positive.

The WA Government’s Office of Science and Innovation, for example, is now supporting the project as part of a broad focus on initiatives with China.

“When people think of Grid computing, they often think of lots of small commodity servers hooked together and running Linux.

“While that kind of format unlocks a significant amount of local computing power for certain types of computing problems, this project demonstrates the benefits of Grids that extend an enterprises reach on a global scale,” said MacDonald.

CBS is working closely with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Computer Network Information Center to determine additional ways to use the Grid.

“Closer socio-economic ties will depend on cooperative development of Grid protocols and their compatibility with established and developing business processes within the three regions.”

“For this reason, we are working closely with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences as well as representatives from within China’s financial services and telecommunications sectors,” said Lloyd.

This liaison will help determine how grid computing can be used to manage the increased volatility faced by businesses within China as they move toward a full market economy.

Source: http://www.gridtoday.com/