Tapping the Computing Power

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Tapping the Computing Power over the Internet
Grid computing has emerged as a new important
field. It is an analogy of the national power
grid that provides a highly robust, standard
source of electrical power. A Gird is a hardware
and software infrastructure that provides a
flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing
among dynamic collection of virtual
organizations. The World Wide Web has provided
an infrastructure on how the information can be
shared globally. The objective of the Grid is to
extend this functionality further with ubiquitous
computation and storage functionality. Just as
the Web changes the way we communicate with each
other, the Grid will change the way we access to
the computation and storage resources. Similar
to the power grid, the Grid will provide a highly
robust, standard source of computation, data
storage and information resources. Bioinformatics
and biomedical applications usually require a
huge amount of computing power (in the order of
Teraflops), involve a large amount of data (in
the order of Terabytes) and demand an ultra high
bandwidth network. We are studying two
applications using the Grid technology. One is
on protein alignment and the other on MEG image
analysis and visualization. Researchers A/Prof.
Lee Bu Sung, A/Prof. Cai Wentong, A/Prof. Bertil
Schmidt