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YEAR BOOK |
Queen's University Belfast
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The impact and potential of Grid Technology
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The Belfast e-Science Centre (BeSC), at Queen's University Belfast was established in 2002, and plays a prominent role in the development and deployment of the UK e-Science Initiative utilising Grid Technologies within Northern Ireland and Europe. BeSC is one of eight regional e-Science Centres established throughout the UK (Newcastle, Manchester, Cardiff, Cambridge, Oxford, Southampton and Imperial College London), with a National e-Science Centre based in Edinburgh, focusing on Grid Technologies and their application.
Grid Technology � What is it
Grid Technology is a form of distributed computing that involves co-ordinating and sharing computers, applications, data, storage and network resources across dynamic and geographically dispersed organizations and regions.
The benefits of Grid Computing are such that more and more businesses are looking to deploy it. Using the Grid, companies can take advantage of unused computer resources to run applications or jobs that otherwise may have had to wait to be run, or were previously impossible to run.
The Grid enhances the Internet with a wide range of computational resources such as data sets, supercomputers and clusters, providing a flexible, dynamic and comprehensive computing infrastructure similar in nature to the electricity grid. The Grid has become possible because of the maturing of a number of technologies and as result will transform the way academic research is performed and the way business and commerce are conducted in the years to come.
The Belfast e-Science Centre
The Belfast e-Science Centre is currently engaged in development and deployment of grid middleware and collaborates with a range of academic and industrial partners in a portfolio of e-Science projects utilising Grid Technology. In the latter case this allows the collaborators to develop novel e-Business opportunities for science, industry and commerce.
The BeSC has a number of high profile projects in the Digital Media, Life Science, Data Mining and Financial sectors utilising Grid Technology.
Grid in the Media
GridCast is a project being undertaken by BBC Northern Ireland, BT and the BeSC. The BBC's broadcast network faces many of the problems which computing grids are designed to solve. It is a distributed circuit, with processing of broadcast material taking place at many sites, carrying content that has very high bandwidth requirements and mixes "live" and stored events. The Gridcast project is piloting grid services to support the BBC sites in their broadcasting activities. The project has developed grid-like services together with processing services that support wide-area data distribution and processing.
Grid in Data Mining
Geddm is a collaborative industrial e-science project which the BeSC is undertaking with industrial partner Datactics Limited which is a Belfast based data-matching software company active in the international market. This project combines the skills and experience of the stakeholders by developing a service oriented grid based framework that defines, coordinates and manages access to distributed unstructured data.
Grid in the Financial Sector
RiskGrid is a project being undertaken by First Derivatives, BT and the BeSC with funding by InvestNI. The financial sector depends heavily on complex calculations and simulations to gain a competitive advantage. Often these calculations put enormous strain on the typical computing resources that are used, given the vast amount of financial data that can be used each day.
The Grid computing-based service called the RiskGrid project provides an example of how Grid computing can offer dramatic improvements in the processing of risk management information.
Grid in Life Sciences
GeneGrid is a collaborative industrial R&D project initiated by BeSC with commercial partners Fusion Antibodies and Amtec Medical which are involved in antibody and drug research and development. It aims to provide a platform for scientists, especially biologists, to access collective skills, experiences and results in a secure, reliable and scalable manner through the creation of a "Virtual Bioinformatics laboratory".
Grid in Commerce
The CRISP project in conjunction with BT, Oracle, and First Derivatives brings together end-users from several industrial sectors, IT service providers, enterprise software and hardware vendors and key e-Science researchers to overcome current limitations in an inter enterprise computing Grid infrastructure. The project will demonstrate this through well-chosen application scenarios from the finance and manufacturing sectors, covering the entire value chain including ICT providers, application vendors and end-users.
Grid Ireland
The Grid Ireland project is a joint project with grid researchers in the Republic of Ireland which brings together and enables communities of users, for example, astrophysicists, geneticists or linguists, to construct virtual organizations. The project will link together the UK and Irish grids. The benefit is a research platform for scientists and an object of research for computer scientists providing a natural symbiosis.
In summary Grid Technology is a reality and will change and impact activities ranging from scientific research and conducting business to booking holidays, and even to the way we watch and craft movies.
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For further information, please refer to the e-Science website www.qub.ac.uk/escience/ or contact: Professor Ron Perrott, Director of the eScience centre; Tel: + 44 (0) 28 909 75463