Grid computing network extends frontiers of research

LONDON - The power of grid computing, explored by a European consortium, is helping extend research in a multitude of disciplines, ranging from genetic origins of heart disease to reconstruction of ancient musical instruments to managing fisheries, says a new report.

A grid is a network of high-powered computing and storage resources available to researchers wishing to carry out advanced number-crunching activities.

For instance, 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 heart disease.

Resources belong to universities, national and international lab and other research centres but are shared between them by mutual agreement.

In Europe, the data is carried over the GANT grid network but the organisation that makes this possible is managed by Enabling Grids for E-science (EGEE-III), the third phase of an EU-funded project to create an infrastructure using grid computing resources.

Coordinated at CERN near Geneva, EGEE links about 14,000 users at 350 sites in 55 countries, both within and outside Europe. Every day, an average of 350,000 computing jobs pass through the network.

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, said an EGEE release.

“We’re seeing increasing use from the computational chemistry area, from materials science, the life sciences, environmental sciences and so forth,” says Steven Newhouse, the project’s technical director.

These findings were published in Nature Genetics.