“International Symposium on Grid Computing 2003 (ISGC 2003) & TW Grid Workshop: Grid Computing in Asia Region” will be held in Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan during from 8 to 11 March, 2003. The Symposium and Workshop are co-organized by Computing Centre, Institute of Physics, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, Institute for Information Industry, and Pacific Neighborhood Consortium.
The concept of Grid Computing extends the original ideas of Internet to share widespread computing power, storage capacities, and many other resources. In the last few years, it gradually gained a prominent attention in academic and research communities. Due to the deluge of the data and information, those fields, such as High Energy Physics, Bio-Informatics, and Digital Archive, demand great deal of computational and storage capacity. The development of Grid Computing makes the on-demand allocation and management of integrated computing resources possible. However, the vision and insight of Grid Computing requires more promotion before it becomes the next generation computing infrastructure.
More concrete implementation of Grid concept has been employed and stress-tested in the field of High Energy Physics. The largest scale project is called LCG (after LHC Computing Grid) which is led by the CERN. Computing facility for LHC is implemented as a global computational Grid with the goal of integrating large geographically distributed computing fabrics into a virtual computing environment. This project tackles problem in distributed scientific applications, computational grid middleware, automated computer system management, high performance networking, object database management, security, and global grid operations.
Not only does the High Energy Physics require Grid Computing, but also the Bio-informatics call for more computational efforts. The BioGrid has been aiming to convert many computational challenges in biology which usually involve years' endeavor into tasks requiring computation of only days or less. Grid computing on biological systems has been facilitated by enormous recent advances in methodologies and algorithms, resulting the increasing scalability in parallel computing and accessibility of heterogeneous platforms.
The ISGC, on the one hand, offers an excellent opportunity to allow the community in Asia Pacific a better understanding of the vision and progress of the Grid technology. It also provides a forum for the potential developers, users in Asia Pacific to meet and to learn from each other. On the other hand, this Symposium demonstrates the development of Grid technology in the Asia Pacific. By exchanging their experiences on how to develop Grid technology and application, this Symposium would provide the Grid community with invaluable insights for future collaboration.
The ISGC will include a series of workshop, tutorial and oral presentation. The Symposium itself would focus on Grid core technology, Grid architecture, applications on High Energy Physics and Bioinformatics. Grid application development, installation, testbed, and collaboration among the communities would also be discussed.