£90,000 State grant to set up computing knowledge grid

Irish research scientists have been granted initial Government funding of £90,000 (€114,000) to establish a computing grid of knowledge where information from a range of academic sources can be shared.

The grid, which is expected to cost around £5 million to develop, will offer massive computing power to Irish-based researchers seeking to solve complex computational problems. Researchers from National University of Ireland, Galway; Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork have agreed to collaborate in the early-stage creation of an Irish computational grid.

Funded in the interim by an Enterprise Ireland grant, the grid will provide a valuable research resource for computer science and information technology. A similar grid is already well beyond the development stages in the US and has the potential to offer scientists computing power up to 100 times the capacity of today's supercomputers.

The grids are designed for those who need substantial computing power by harnessing the resources of many geographically dispersed machines, and getting them to operate as an efficient virtual computer.

Central to the computing grid is software, or "middleware" - in this case Globus - which allows the computer user to extract information from a network of distributed computing resources. The user sets a PC an intelligent task - for example, an economist may request data on future economic behaviour - and the grid enables software tools to interrogate any relevant database.

According to Dr Andy Shearer of NUI Galway's IT department, Compaq in Galway has already supplied a lot of high-performance equipment for the project. Trinity College, under Dr Brian Coghlan, is taking responsibility for the grid's basic hardware architecture, a task which involves figuring out how to connect clusters of computers across different institutions.

Dr John Morrison at University College Cork is working with his team to devise a user-friendly methodology for the grid, while Dr Shearer and his team are developing applications to demonstrate its processing power potential.

This includes a medical imaging application that draws on huge computing resources to estimate more accurately radiotherapy doses to aid the treatment of tumours. It has been developed in collaboration with medical physicists in Galway.

In the longer term, Dr Shearer envisages other Irish educational and research institutions joining the programme, with the eventual aim of developing a comprehensive Irish computational grid that can later hitch itself to a proposed Europe-wide grid and the US grid.

"Once the grid is up and running, if anyone wants to become involved and has computing capability of scale, they can access the network," Dr Shearer says.

The potential savings to research units working on low budgets are immense. Where a good high-performance computer can cost several million pounds, the grid will harness the idle processing capability of many computers to offer a single, low-cost source of processing power.

Dr Shearer says the potential of the grid can not yet be envisaged. "It's much the same as when in the 1970s people couldn't predict the power of the Internet as a massive supplier of information, the grid has huge potential as a source of computing power."