University of Southern California to receive $2.1 million for Next-Generation Computing GridMarina del Rey 24 September 2001 The USC School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute will share as a major partner in a $12.1 million National Science Foundation grant to develop new ways of sharing one-of-kind scientific instruments, data, and programmes. NSF announced the award today.
The grant is the third important recent endorsement of so-called "grid" software and tools developed by the Globus Project, an effort led by Carl Kesselman, a research associate professor of computer science at USC who is director of ISI's Center for Grid Technologies; and Ian Foster, who holds joint appointments as a professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and as Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.
Professor Kesselman described what this NSF grant is working toward: "Consider a professor teaching a class in environmental engineering, who wants his students to gets hands-on experience with environmental monitoring and modelling. The technologies that we will deploy for authentication, resource discovery, and so forth will make it possible for these students to call upon national resources as they undertake class projects."
The award is the third major endorsement in recent weeks of the Globus approach, which began as a way to allow raw computing power to be distributed and shared instantly and easily, just as electrical energy is through a power grid, and has developed into means to effectively share unique instruments, databases, and programmes beyond the capacity of the existing Internet.
On August 2, IBM Corporation announced a large-scale effort to support what its announcement called "Grid Computing", a revolutionary new open-source based computing model that IBM sees as a critical next step in the evolution of the Internet. In the same way it played a leadership role in the commercial adoption of Linux, IBM will work with Globus and related open source development communities.
On August 27, the NSF announced a $10 million grant to create a national virtual "collaboratory" to share equipment, data and research tools to help engineers create better techniques to safeguard structures against earthquakes. This NCSA-led effort to build a National Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, or NEESGrid, will incorporate Globus technology, and have the Globus partners as co-investigators.
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