About ASGC

The concept of Grid Computing is an extension of the Internet used to share widespread computing power, storage capabilities, and many other resources. Over the last few years, it has gradually gained prominence in academic and research communities. Many fields--such as High Energy Physics, Bio-Informatics, and Digital Archive--demand greater storage capacities due to the deluge of data and information being created. Grid Computing makes on-demand allocation and management of integrated computing resources possible. However, Grid Computing requires more development before it can become the next generation computing infrastructure.

This concept of Grid Computing has concrete implementation that has been employed and stress-tested in the field of High Energy Physics. The largest project today is the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) under CERN. The goal is to integrate large geographically distributed computing fabrics into one virtual computing environment for the LHC. This project involves distributed scientifice applications, computational grid middleware, automated computer system management, high performance networking, object database management, secureity, and global grid operations.

Deploying Grid technology in 2000, ASGC has provided the Grid-related technology and infrastructure support for the LHC experiments (ATLAS and CMS) in Taiwan. Signing the MoU with CERN in December 2005, ASGC became the WLCG Tier-1 centre and played a leading role in Asia. Acting as the major node of e-Science Centre in the world, ASGC serves as CIC/ROC (Core Infrastructure Centre/Regional Operation Centre). The function of CIC is to provide monitoring and operational trouble shooting support on a global scale whereas the objective of ROC is to facilitate the deployment and expansion of the Grid infrastructure and to maximize the availability and performance of Grid Services.

The ASGC has been actively participating in the WLCG/EGEE project through various activities ranging from strategic planning to infrastructure deployment and services. In addition, ASGC is proactively interoperated with other major Grid systems such as Open Science Grid (OSG) and NorduGrid.

Other than the Grid applications for high energy physics, ASGC has been developing various applications on Grid infrastructure in collaboration with domain experts, such as Bioinformatics (mpiBLAST-g2), Biomedicine (Distributing AutoDock tasks on the Grid), Digital Archive (Data Grid for Digital Archive Long-term preservation), Atmospheric Science, Geoscience (GeoGrid for Data management and hazards mitigation) and Ecology Research and Monitoring.