INDUSTRY

By Jennifer Mears, Network World -- As the number of suspected Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome cases in Taiwan grew last week, a group of vendors was banding together to give hospitals and health organizations a way to share possibly life-saving information. Taiwanese hospitals are now in the process of deploying Access Grid, an open source collaboration application that was designed to harness grid computing power to give users virtual meeting capabilities that Access Grid developers say go beyond typical videoconferencing. We got a call to arms over the open source development list for Access Grid . . . indicating that there was an urgent requirement for support for some hospitals that are in the trenches battling SARS," says Mary Spada, program manager, strategic initiatives at the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which developed the Access Grid technology. The National Center for High-Performance Computing in Taiwan made the initial request May 15, indicating an urgent need for expertise in establishing Access Grid capabilities. Access Grid will link medical facilities in Taiwan with health officials at the health department in Taiwan, the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, she says. "They're calling it an emergency response network," she says. The goal in Taiwan is to use Access Grid to share X-rays and medical information about SARS patients. An e-mail sent from the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly at the University of California, San Diego says "there are 3,000 patients, each requiring a minimum of one X-ray per day, for 30 days. The size of each file [X-ray] ranges from 1 megabyte to 20 megabytes." Access Grid will create a secure repository for those files and "allow doctors remote viewing and collaboration of patient X-rays and other information to provide expert diagnosis and analysis to combat the SARS crisis," the e-mail says. Argonne National Laboratory developed the Access Grid technology in the late 1990s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, to take advantage of emerging grid computing as a basis for distributed group collaboration. Access Grid users set up nodes or "design spaces" that have the audio and visual technology needed to create a high-quality collaborative experience. Access Grid provides remote collaboration with virtual rooms that mimic what users would have in face-to-face situations, Spada says. "You have multiple feeds of information. Just like if you walk into a room, you don't just stare at one little spot, you're not limited in what you can look at and what you can touch," she says. "Similarly, in an Access Grid session, I may have a document up, I may have a Web site up, I have lots of pictures in front of me." And participants can zoom in on where they want to take a closer look and see each other via video feeds, she adds.