APAC Grid

The APAC Grid program is building a national grid infrastructure integrating the APAC and partner facilities to give Australian researchers seamless access the computational and data resources in these facilities. The grid will also provide a new range of services to support research collaboration, nationally and internationally.

The program consists of 9 projects which collectively are developing the APAC Grid infrastructure and delivering services to users. The projects have been designed to focus on engineering (building the APAC Grid) and services (supporting users of the APAC Grid) rather than on research and development.

There are two kinds of projects:

Application support projects which support specific research communities to use the APAC Grid. Six projects support communities in each of the following areas: astronomy, high-energy physics, bioinformatics, geoscience, chemistry and earth systems.
Infrastructure projects which build and operate the APAC Grid and provide services to satisfy the requirements of the research communities. The three infrastructure projects cover computing infrastructure, information infrastructure, and user interface and visualization infrastructure.

The program has implemented management arrangements that involve a reporting structure through the project leaders and the program manager.

The partners are responsible for contributing the resources to the projects, ensuring that staff employed with the resources are suitably qualified and have sufficient expertise to carry out the activities and for using the APAC funds for the purposes of the program.

The program has an Engineering Task Force to guide the design, development and installation of the APAC Grid. The task force has to ensure that the APAC Grid is developed in an integrated and uniform way that responds to the requirements of the application support projects. Meetings of the task force therefore focus on the overall plan for the APAC Grid and provide discussion forums for the 9 projects. The membership of the task force is the program manager (as chair) and the project leaders. This task force met for the first time on 20 August 2004.

The program also has an Implementation Task Force to coordinate the implementation of the design of the APAC Grid. The membership of this task force is the program manager (as chair), the project leaders of the 3 infrastructure projects and representatives of the partners who are responsible for the operation of the partner facilities.

The program will also establish a Grid Operations Centre to provide support to users of the APAC Grid. Similar centres have been established overseas for operational grids and parallel the 'network operations centres' for communications networks.

The plans of the projects in the program identify more than 200 people and more than 60 equivalent full time positions.

Contact

Dr Lindsay Hood
Acting Manager, APAC Grid Program
APAC
The Australian National University
CANBERRA ACT 0200

Phone: +612 6125 0321

Fax: +612 6125 8199