Friday, October 25, 2002

IBM, OxfordGrid fights cancer - Oxford University recently joined with IBM and the British government to begin to create a country-wide computing Grid that will help doctors diagnose and treat breast cancer. As conceived, the project would be one of the first Grids to be composed entirely of commercial technology. What is a grid? It could be described as a large combine of computers noodling on a great problem. The most vivid example of the Grid to date has been the SETI project, which asked desktop computer users around the world to join together in a network that makes use of unused computer cycles to study deep-space data that may disclose life in other solar systems. As with many promising new technologies, there is a lot about Grid computing that is really not that new. Like clusters, Ethernet and Internet, it pulls diverse systems together. The Oxford program is a bit different than Grid as shown in SETI; it represents more a data grid than a compute grid. The system will feed breast cancer patient data into a federated database residing at four U.K. computing centers, at first, with more machines to come online later. The details of the federation are not worked out at this point. One could guess the system would rely on XML to integrate diverse data, but it would not be proper to call it a big ‘XML Grid,’ an individual close to the projects says. An important player in this project is Mirada Solutions, an imaging software concern that will work to standardize new and existing digital mammogram images, to, in effect, normalize the data being viewed. SETI http://www-3.ibm.com/solutions/lifesciences/solutions/discoverylink.html Grid Computing Information Centre http://www.acm.org/cacm/1101/p77-carriero.pdf ACM News Service Dell Offering Software From Platform Computing Entropia - PC Grid Computing Grid Computing Planet Conference & Expo, Boston, MA - October 28 - 29, 2002 IBM Life Sciences DiscoveryLink NewMetaphors OOPSLA 2002 Trellis Platforms and Infogons ZDNet - Weaving grid computing into the Net 2:08:29 PM    comment []