GOVERNMENT

In Australia, Alphawest today announced Monash University has been selected as the winner of the Sun Fire Grid Grant Program 2004. The Sun Fire Grid Grant program is jointly sponsored by Sun Microsystems and Alphawest, a Sun specialist solution partner for the education market. The program is designed to further encourage the use of Grid Computing as a principal technology solution supporting key research projects within Australia. It received a significant level of interest from education and research institutions Australia wide with many high quality nominations being received. After careful consideration of all nominations, Monash University was selected as the winning submission and will receive a grant from Sun Microsystems for the Sun Fire Grid Computing solution, valued in excess of $150,000. The grant is based upon the provision of a Sun Fire V20z Compute Grid Rack system based on ten High Performance Dual Processor Sun Fire V20z AMD Opteron Servers. For Alphawest, Sun Microsystems’ preferred partner for education in Australia, this program demonstrates its commitment to the ongoing development of the education sector. This grant represents the latest in a series of major computing grants that have been undertaken by Sun Microsystems for the Australian education and research communities. “Considering the number of high quality applications we received from Institutions throughout Australia, this is a major success for Monash University,” said Mark Towers, National Manager for Education, Alphawest. “This grant program is fostering the development of world-class research in Australia and Monash University has identified a variety of projects where grid computing will maximise the value of its research.” “Sun is investing significant resources in the development of technical and scientific computing, including the recent establishment of its Asia Pacific Science and Technology Centre (APTSC) in Singapore,” said Andrew Boulus, National Manager – Education and Research, Sun Microsystems. “This centre will support the development of research activities throughout Asia and Australia. The Sun Fire Grid Grant program is just one example of how we are working with Alphawest to cut cost and complexity for the education and research sectors in Australia.” Monash University, an established leader in research in Australia, has identified a number of projects that will immediately benefit from the Sun Fire V20z Grid. This grant will help Monash University extend the frontiers of knowledge in the research areas identified as having national priority set by the Australian Research Council. Professor Edwina Cornish, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) at Monash University said, “The grant will be a very valuable addition to Monash’s already significant investment in eResearch, by providing high-performance computing equipment which will offer numerous opportunities for leading edge research at Monash.” The projects that will benefit from the grant involve simulating entire networks, comprising millions of tiny devices, within the memory of a computer. These initiatives are led by Dr Asad Khan of the Faculty of Information Technology, who said that the computational power of the Sun Fire equipment would facilitate the development of these cutting edge technologies at Monash. The Sun Fire system will also be used by Professor David Abramson’s research group at Monash, for further development of the Nimrod/Gtoolset that is used extensively to support Grid computing activities amongst researchers, both locally and internationally. Professor Ron Weber, Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology, said, “The grant could open opportunities for developing new technologies that addressed critical areas such as aged-care and water resource conservation. For example, embedded networks of cubic millimetre-sized computers and limited radio-frequency devices, such as single-chip motes or reprogrammable RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identifications), could make possible an irrigation system that released water according to plant needs and soil moisture conditions.” Monash University has decided to immediately upgrade the grid to a full 64 CPU configuration. “We have done this to provide ample capacity to enable leading edge research into grid services and to support cross disciplinary research,” said Alan McMeekin, Executive Director of Information Technology Services at Monash University. Sun Microsystems is a pioneer in the development of grid solutions for academic and enterprise computing. It was a founding member of the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA), a consortium created to improve grid computing tools and standards and accelerate the deployment of enterprise grid computing. Alphawest is partnering with Sun to facilitate the deployment of grid computing in the education sector.