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Sun Microsystems helps set up grid computing lab

Engineers and researchers have for many years dreamed of a world in which people could share immense computing power and data storage to improve the way they work.

Sun Microsystems Inc and National Central University (NCU) yesterday moved to realize that dream by establishing Taiwan's first grid-computing laboratory.

Grid, or distributed, computing emerged about five years ago and links hundreds or even thousands of computers to enable the sharing, selection and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources. The technology aims to provide vast computing power or data storage to companies who pay only for what they use.

"So far, grid computing is mostly applied to the research domain -- such as civil engineering, the environment and such things -- but I'm sure it will be used in commercial computing in the next few years," Dinesh Bahal, director of Sun's global education and research in the Asia-Pacific region, said at a signing ceremony yesterday. "In short, it will change our way of working and doing business."

For the first three years of the cooperation, Sun and NCU will pump in NT$100 million in the Grid Computing Center.

The center will initially be used in NCU research projects for space remote sensing, optics, environment, communication systems and nanotechnology, said Chiang Wei-ling (蔣偉寧), a civil engineering professor at NCU who will supervise the center.

NTC also plans to invite institutions including National Tsing Hua University and National Chiao Tung University to participate in research, Chiang said.

"I think the cooperation will make us one of the world's top 500 universities in the high-performance computing field," he said.

Sun has already joined several other institutes, including the University of California, San Diego, in the US, the University of Ulm in Germany and the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory in Canada -- to develop grid computing technology.

"Grid computing is the most influential information technology in this century," said Alan Chang (張鴻瑜), general manager of Sun Microsystems Taiwan. "Currently, the utility rate of workstations, storage facilities and servers on the Internet is 5 percent to 20 percent on average, and with grid computing, it will drive up the rate to 98 percent, which will help to resolve a lot of complicated computing in a short time."

A pioneer in the field is SETI@home, a never-ending search for signs of life from space that began in the 1990s. The program uses idle computers to process data picked up by radiotelescopes.

Another example is the IBM/Oxford eDiamond project in Britain, which is a part of the government's "e-science initiative," helping doctors detect and treat breast cancer with five hospitals or screening centers sharing a grid.

In 2002 in Taiwan, IBM Corp, Academia Sinica and National Yang-Ming University built a biotechnology research center powered by grid computing provided by IBM. The grid connected seven biological institutions with a goal to expand the grid to more than 100 within three years.

IBM signed a similar research pact with National Cheng Kung University last year.
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