Meeting the Asian Pacific partners at the International Symposium for Grids and Clouds in Taipei
This week I have been in Taipei for the International Symposium on Grids and Clouds 2011 and OGF31 at Academia Sinica.
It has been a fascinating week – the food, scenery and presentations have all been of a very high standard, even if I have seen it all through a fog of jet lag. My laptop is still on Amsterdam time and it’s a slightly surreal experience to be sitting in a session that both computer and body clocks are telling me is on at ten to four in the morning.
Many of the talks and workshops have been highlighted in the GridCast blog run by the e-ScienceTalk team, who are reporting live at www.gridcast.org, not to mention hosting some rather intriguing photos…
Of particular interest to EGI-InSPIRE members will be the reports on activities by our Asia Pacific project partners. We have heard from representatives from several of them this week, as well as from other countries in the region and I thought I would put together a brief summary of what they’ve reported so far.
Taiwan
Eric Yen of our hosts, ASGC, talked to us about eScience development in Taiwan. They have 38 sites in 15 countries and more than 1800 users. Since November 2010, they’ve had an average availability of over 90%. They host 15,000 cores, 5 PB disk storage and 4 PB tape storage, supporting 62,000 jobs per day in areas such as high energy physics and biomedicine.
TWGrid intergrates national industries and Federal research applications. The Academia Sinica Grid Computing Center(ASGC) aims to establish a new national research infrastructure environment, by sharing their experiences of collaborating with WLCG as the only Asian Tier 1 site, through EGEE and now of course EGI-InSPIRE. They are a hub for this activity in the region and have hosted the ISGC series of events for nearly 10 years, for which we are all very grateful!
Japan
Sadly, only a few Japanese delegates have been able to travel to Taiwan for the event, so we have not been able to get a full picture of grids and clouds in Japan. However, Tomoaki Nakamura from the University of Tokyo told us about WLCG site management in the Tokyo Tier2 site. In 2002, this was set up as an ATLAS regional analysis centre. They expect that the entire system (apart from cooling) will be obsolete within 3 years and have to be completely replaced. Around 2% of ATLAS user analysis jobs have been processed at Tokyo Tier 2 on 1280 cores, representing 160 nodes. Incoming data peaks at 8MB/sec and they have seen 98% availability and reliability in the last twelve months.
Thailand
Piyawat Srichaikul of NECTEC (National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre) and the Thailand e-Science infrastructure consortium project gave us a brief history of grid in Thailand (which apparently in time-honoured research tradition was founded after a discussion over drinks…). So, grid arrived in Thailand in 2000 with the foundation of the ThaiGrid group, followed by PRAGMA the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly in 2002. By 2003 ThaiGrid had 100 processors in 5 universities. In 2004 the National Grid Project was proposed, then funded from 2005 to 2009, with 192 nodes. They support life science, digital media, enterprise computing, computer science and engineering, and education, aiming not only to enhance research and education in Thailand, but also to stimulate the IT industry in the country. The new National e-Science Project is a 5 year project funded at 3.7 million US dollars, supporting applications in particle physics, climatechange, water resource, energy and environmental management, computer science and engineering, and HPC. They are starting out with 200 cores and 200TB of storage, aiming to build up to 856 cores and 520 TB over the five years.
Korea
Soonwok Hwang of KISTI told us about grid and cloud activities in Korea. They have hosted an ALICE Tier 2 Center since 2007, funded by their Science and Technology ministry. They have up to 150 cores planned and 1.2% of ATLAS tasks are processed here. The FKPPL VO- production grid infrastructure has been up and running since October 2008 with 10,000 CPU cores and 30 TB of disk storage. The National Cancer Centre in Korea is now using this resource and they also run training schools. They have now launched the KISTI GSDC project, so KISTI is expected to act as a Tier 1 data center in this.
There are more updates from Asian Pacific partners in another session, so I'll keep you posted!
