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News Connection
CERN Land
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It
is a pleasure to announce that the International Symposium on Grid
Computing (ISGC) 2010 will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei from
7-12 March 2010.
With
the continuous support and enthusiasm of all delegates from local and
overseas, ISGC has become one of the foremost international grid forums
in Asia Pacific. It aims to enhance the awareness of grid computing
activities as well as foster the e-Science application in Asia-Pacific.
It is our belief that the extraordinary contributions from all ISGC
2010 delegates will not only make the symposium a triumphant sharing
experience, but also provide the grid community valuable insights for
future development and collaboration.
The
Grid Activities in Asia-Pacific have been drawn attention as the main
theme since past ISGCs, which have provided a great opportunity for
grid experts and application users to have a better understanding of
the requirements and the methods of using grid. It also presents how
grid initiatives in Asia collaborate with industry and academic players
from other continents.
ISGC
covers the topics in the fields of grid infrastructure including Grid
Operation & Management, Grid Middleware & Interoperability,
Grid Security & Networking and Grid Computing & Cloud
Computing; as well as the applications in different disciplines such as
High Energy Physics, Biomedicine & Life Sciences, Earth Sciences,
Environmental Monitoring & Disaster Mitigation, Humanities &
Social Sciences, and Digital Library & Content Management.
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EUAsiaGrid Online Training |
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January 18 to February 12, 2010
EUAsiaGrid Online Training aims at providing the
basic know-how to use a Grid infrastructure powered by gLite
middleware. During the course, participants will be shortly introduced
to the Grid concept, after they will perform practical exercises,
described step-by-step, showing the different components available in
the infrastructure, so to understand how these works and how to use
them in the participant workflow. The course will span 4 weeks: the
first week will provide the introduction to Grid and the security
components, the second week will show how to execute application
remotely, the third week is dedicated to the Data management and
finally several higher level components, useful in many application
contexts, will be showed.
For each week participants will find a couple of
documents (can be pdf presentation or recorded presentation) coming
from past events handled by EUAsiaGrid project, updated and arranged
for this specific event. Additionally, wiki pages for step-by-step will
be available.
The interaction between students and trainers will be made by the project forum
The target audience is made by new Grid users who have no previous
experience and want to try the infrastructure. The effort should be
appreciatively half day per week.
In order to join the school, participants should register themselves in the training tool at:
http:///euasiagrid.org/moodle
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Last Updated ( gT, 06 @ 2010 )
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Computer simulation of potential drug candidate attacking avian flu virus
- Image courtesy Dr. In-Da Wu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Dealing with deadly diseases is not just a matter of test-tubes and petri dishes. Increasingly, high performance computing
centres are being used to simulate the ways that new drugs could attach viruses, looking for a magic bullet that could cure
diseases or even prevent epidemics.
The way it works is that a large number of chemical compounds are simulated by computer for their ability to fit snugly into
the chemical coating of a virus, thus blocking its ability to function properly. Launched in March 2009, the so-called 「Avian
Flu DC2 Refinement」 is the latest attack on avian flu using sheer computing power. This initiative is supported by the
EUAsiaGrid community, a partnership of Asian and European research institutions developing new uses of Grid
computing for science and society, which is led by Academia Sinica Grid Computing (ASGC) in Asia, and INFN in Italy. Grid
computing is all about using distributed computing resources in data centres around the globe, and is made possible
thanks to superfast fibre optic connections that are criss-crossing the globe.
The drug compounds being tested in Avian Flu DC2 Refinement are the
results from a previous run of computer-aided chemical analysis, called
EGEE DC2. In 2008 EGEE DC2 completed computing of the 300,000 molecules
for 8 new Avian Flu mutation targets. ASGC extracted from these results
20,000 high-score compounds (drug molecules that looked likely to have
an effect) for the DC2 Refinement.
In addition, ASGC also assisted all Asian partners to set up the
necessary IT infrastructure service to share their computing resources
in a secure and efficient way.
Technically speaking, this was done by setting up RA (Registration
Authority) and CA (Certificate Authority) services, establishing an
EUAsiaGrid VO (Virtual Organization) and deploying GAP (Grid
Application Platform) Virtual Screening
Service (GVSS) over EUAsiaGrid infrastructure. GVSS is an application
package that integrates the EGEE gLite software
DIANE2 and AMGA and employs Autodock as the simulation docking engine.
Within the GVSS, the EUAsiaGrid users
could upload their compounds and targets, submit massive grid jobs and
run docking process over EUAsiaGrid VO
computing resources. Furthermore, the progress of job execution can be
remotely monitored and the results directly
displayed in GVSS.
Thanks to Grid computing technology, some 125 processor cores – the heart of every computer – joined forces, even
though they were thousands of miles apart, in computing centres in Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia, to name a few. During
three weeks, users from Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia subscribed to this service and then submitted
computing jobs over GVSS to EUAsiaGrid VO. All of computing jobs were completed within four weeks. A total of 1,111
CPU-days were used, which is equivalent to running a single computer for over three years.. Over 160,000 files generated
a large data volume, about 12.8 Gigabytes, which was collected in a database.
In the future, thanks to the EUAsiaGrid community's efforts biomedical experts will be able to use the newly gained
information to guide their search for better drugs for Avian Flu, and save them many costly false starts.
Note to Editors,
1. For more information on EUAsiaGrid DC2 Refined Activity, please see
http://www.euasiagrid.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=96
2. For more information about Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE), please see
http://www.eu-egee.org
3. For more information about the EUAsiaGrid project, please see
http://www.euasiagrid.eu
4. For more information on the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC), please see
http://www.twgrid.org
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Last Updated ( g|, 16 C 2009 )
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