The Grid technology

A European consortium has brought the power of grid computing to bear on problems ranging from the genetic origins of heart disease to the management of fish stocks and the reconstruction of ancient musical instruments.A 'grid' is a network of high-powered computing and storage resources available to researchers wishing to carry out advanced number-crunching activities. Resources belong to individual universities, national and international laboratories and other research centres but are shared between them by mutual agreement.
In Europe the data is carried over the GÉANT grid network but the organisation that makes this possible is managed by EGEE-III, the third phase of an EU-funded project to create an infrastructure supporting European researchers using grid computing resources.Although grid computing began in the high-energy physics community -- and EGEE will be on hand to process the long-awaited data from the Large Hadron Collider -- many other disciplines are now using EGEE to access the world's most powerful computing facilities.What many of the applications have in common is the simulation of experiments that would take years or decades to do in the laboratory. A common theme is to study how complex molecules interact with each other, with many applications in the search for new vaccines and other drugs.Scientists from the EU's Cardiogenics project were able to find four out of more than 8.1 million possible combinations of genetic markers that were strongly associated with the disease.
A group in Taiwan is using EGEE to model the effects of earthquakes on urban areas in the hope of learning how to keep damage to a minimum. It's combining physical sciences and social sciences to do something really practical.Another project, AquaMaps, is using the grid to model the worldwide distribution of fish species. Because climate change is affecting the patterns of where you might find marine species, fish stock management is quite an issue.With everything changing so rapidly, the AquaMaps project is mapping where you can find particular species of fish at any one time.
EGEE is also helping doctors to treat rare diseases through a project to create a worldwide image library.It gives them almost instant access to medical images spread around the world but in a secure manner.The benefits of EGEE have spread beyond the hard sciences and medicine into the humanities. The multidisciplinary ASTRA team in Italy used the grid to construct a digital model of an epigonion, a harp-like instrument used in ancient Greece. The virtual instrument was played in a concert in Naples last December.
One of the original motivations for this grid activity was that all this computing power could change the way that scientists do their research.We want to move away from the short-term project model that has happened within EGEE to a model which is both more sustainable financially but also more sustainable and longer term for the users that increasingly depend upon this infrastructure.Newhouse likens the grid to other scientific instruments that have changed the way we look at the world. It's like the invention of the microscope or the telescope. The grid is actually changing the way scientists think about doing their research and the questions they can pose.