INDUSTRY

By Katie Williams, NCSA -- The UK e-Science Program aims to make the grid a scientific workhorse. -- Modern medicine has worked many miracles for human beings. It has prolonged life with vaccines and other preventative treatments. It has halted some forms of cancer with new surgical techniques and treatments. It has made possible procedures and medicines that would have been deemed impossible only a few decades ago. With the creation of the United Kingdom's e-Science Grid, scientists are attempting to take medical science one step further through technologies that make it possible for individuals to have their own personal medical environments, which would monitor the medicines, nutritional needs, and other needs highly specific to each individual. This project, called My Grid, aims to create personalized extensible environments for data intensive experiments in biology, some of which are based on the information obtained through the human genome project. It is one of the many pilot projects funded by the UK e-Science Program, an initiative with the goal of creating global collaborative efforts in key areas of science through a grid infrastructure linking universities throughout the United Kingdom and industries throughout the world. Tony Hey, the director of the UK e-Science Core Program, believes that if done correctly, the e-Science initiative "will change the dynamic of the way science is undertaken." At a recent visit to the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign, Hey talked about what e-Science is, what the project hopes to achieve, and how it relates to other projects seeking to widen the impact of the grid. Using NASA's Information Power Grid (IPG) as a model for their own grid, Hey and his colleagues started the e-Science Program by tackling the task of finding a highly capable computing and data service that would remain robust and easy to use, and enable remote scientists from all areas to interact with one another. "If you want to do a whole system, you have to put these scientists together. You can move the computer, you can move the data, but it's not easy to move the experts," Hey said. The UK e-Science Program's vision was kept afloat with grant money that enabled the group to upgrade its supercomputer to 3 teraflops, start programs almost immediately, and create grid applications in areas of science and engineering. The Core Program, which Hey directs, received £35 million from grants and matching industry funds to encourage the development of generic, industrial-strength grid middleware. The universities in the UK e-Science Program have put several grid enabling tools and resources to use, including the Globus middleware toolkit, the Condor high-throughput distributed computing system, and a storage resource broker, which accesses stored data. With these services and tools as a lure, they are attempting to bring major companies like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, and Compaq into their program. The idea is to encourage the companies to come together and share resources, data, and engineering applications while keeping their own identities-what Hey calls a virtual organization. "There is a hope," Hey said, "that we can move the grid from the 'scientific ghetto' to the business world." Hey said the companies have reacted very positively to the idea of joining the e-Science Program. Because of this interaction between the research sector and industry, Hey believes that by 2003 or 2004, industry will be using the grid as its mainstream system for interactions and collaborations. In order to encourage more organizations and scientists to join the UK e-Science Program, the project is spending £75 million for application pilots like My Grid. "The grid is an emerging technology," Hey said. "Scientists are skeptical. Computer scientists are skeptical. Politicians and industry are skeptical. We need to actually convince them there's something worth their engaging and something to work towards." Other pilot application programs under development include Grid Particle Physics (Grid PP) and AstroGrid. Grid PP will link to the European Union DataGrid, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Project, and the United States' GriPhyN and Particle Physics DataGrid Project. The AstroGrid will be a virtual observatory where students will be able to observe not only stars and other visible astronomical objects, but also measure ultraviolet rays, x-rays, gamma rays, infrared, and radio waves. These phenomena, collected by different types of telescopes worldwide, will be available remotely to anyone who is interested. "In essence, if we make this work," Hey said, "these instruments will democratize access to this. It will not only be scientists who can do colliding black hole calculations. Some guy in Timbuktu will be able to because he can look at the data and the calculations too." As part of the engineering and physical science aspect of e-Science, six projects are being funded, including My Grid. The first of these projects is called Comb-e-Chem, a combinatorial chemistry application. The program will allow students and researchers to virtually mix chemicals together and then try to identify the compounds they produce and the particular benefits these compounds may have. A Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment (DAME) project is also under development. The aim of this project is to produce sensors that measure temperature, vibration, and pressure of airplane engines as they fly from one location to another. Instead of waiting until a plane lands, sensor data will be sampled in flight and compared with constant patterns. If problems are detected mechanics can replace the damaged or faulty engine parts as soon as the plane lands and before anything drastic occurs. The Reality Grid is an e-Science project that will use the UK's national teraflop computer in Manchester, England, to investigate condensed matter and materials. The Geodise project is a grid-enabled optimization and design search program for engineers. The program will allow Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace, and subsequently other companies, speed up the design process of their vehicles by capturing knowledge from previous designs and putting it together for simulation. The final pilot in the engineering and physical science sector of the e-Science Program is Discovery Net. This program will produce high-throughput sensing applications such as environmental sensors and bioinformatic monitors. With this program, doctors someday may be able to monitor the blood pressure, temperature, and drug intake of all their patients. A sensor on the patient's body will communicate the data through a mobile wireless communication device to the doctor's office. Although all of these projects point to a positive future, Hey cautioned, "It's an exciting agenda, but you have to bear in mind they haven't achieved anything yet." For more information about the UK e-Science Program, visit http://umbriel.dcs.gla.ac.uk/NeSC/. 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