Computer News No.102, March-April 2003

Development of GRID Computing at HKU

1. What is Grid Computing?
2. The HKU Grid Development Project

1. What is Grid Computing?

A "Grid", in computer language, is a virtual computer system that integrates multiple servers, storage systems, databases, applications and human resources over the network as if all these resources were available on the user's own workstation. A variety of universities and research institutions have started to introduce and develop Grid systems, which promise to make accessible to individual scientists' terminals huge calculation capability and databases, various applications and expert advice previously unobtainable by any one scientist.

Grids are built with clusters of networked computers, enabling users to share inexpensive access to computing power, storage systems, data sources and applications over the Internet to tackle big problems. This supercomputing model borrows from modern electrical grids in the sense that it combines geographically dispersed resources to generate more power on demand.
 

2. The HKU Grid Development Project

The Computer Centre has been working on the Grid development area for almost a year. In the first stage, we have set up a Grid working environment on several internal experimental clusters enabling the running of a parallel program to be executed across these experimental clusters.

With the collaboration from the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS), we then extended our testing environment such that some testing programs can span across two clusters with one in the Computer Centre and the other in the CSIS department.  More work will be carried out and we hope that the Grid testing can be further extended to include other clusters in Hong Kong and then to other parts in the world as well.

In order to build our Grid and also to provide a gateway for our users to access the international Grid, we need to adapt a commonly accepted communication and security protocol, as well as software tools that have been accepted by the Grid community.  Currently we are using the Globus Toolkit to set up the Grid infrastructure. This toolkit is the current de facto standard in Grid computing, and is used by many organizations to build computational grids that support their applications.

Globus is one of the pioneer international projects in Grid computing. Its activities are organized around four major areas namely: basic research, test beds, applications and software tools. The Globus Toolkit is released regularly enabling the easy building of computational grids and grid-based applications. These tools are collectively known as the Globus Toolkit. (Named by R&D magazine among the 100 most significant technologies in 2002.) The package has already been set up in the HKUHPCC (HKU High Performance Computer Cluster) system. Technical details in how to access the international Grid via the HKU campus network can be found in http://www.hku.hk/cc/grid.

Individual department users who wish to install the Grid software in their department clusters please contact the undersigned.
 

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Woo Chat Ming 
Tel: 2857 8632 
E-mail: cmwoo@hkucc.hku.hk