Grid activities in Indonesia at ISGC 2011
Basuki Suhardiman of ITB in Indonesia described the activities of inGrid, which was developed by the University of Indonesia using a UCLA grid portal, build around the Globus Toolkit grid middleware. In 2008 two clusters were connected to inGrid, including one production cluster and one research cluster. ITB is connected directly to Hong Kong through TEIN3.
There is one ITB grid site, with a cluster for meteorological research. The main applications running on the grid are for weather forecasting and disaster mitigation. The weather forecast application uses MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) data from satellite images to generate weather forecasts for display on a website, showing parameters such as infrared and water vapour. The plan is to support numerical weather prediction (NWP) and develop a common regional platform for NWP in South East Asia. They are currently testing their weather forecast application on their GPU cluster.
The second application area is natural disaster mitigation, which will combine seismic, earthquake and migration data with the vulnerabilities of road, electricity and water services. These need to be overlaid on digital maps, which in some cases has meant digitising the maps to start off with. The region is also prone to forest fires, and the governments of Indonesia and Australia are working together to set up automatic real-time satellite monitoring, high speed access to satellite image products and mapping of forest cover.
The resulting maps are now online, but in the future they hope to be able to process the location more accurately and reduce processing time from 12 hours to one. They would also like to overlay the maps with other data, such as wind direction and wind speed. Adding volcano activity to the map would also provide a full hazard map. There are barriers to this however, as there are only a couple of dozen seismic sensors located in the region, which are not connected to the network but are isolated.
Finally, ITB will be working to expand grid computing to other universities, and are hoping to get ten more on board. At the moment, knowledge of the grid in Indonesia is not well developed and they anticipate holding conferences and training to improve the situation.
