This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Ian Greenshields and Dr. Reda Ammar, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, and Dr. Ayman El-Dessouki, President of the Electronics Research Institute (ERI), Cairo, Egypt. They propose to do research, which seeks to establish the ERI in Cairo as a Center of Excellence in Egypt in grid computing, linking Egyptian and US computation resources. The project will include three phases: an establishment phase, in which a small US-Egyptian cluster is established at ERI, together with extant grid middleware; an educational phase, in which they will jointly create an on-line educational resource for Egyptian (and also for U.S.) scientists regarding grid computing; and a research phase, in which they will exercise the small clusters with a collaborative project in computational medicine to assess loading characteristics relative to time differences and the effect of low bandwidth network connections relative to problem granularity and the ratio of compute time to data transfer time.
Scope: The aggregation of widely distributed computing resources into a seamless massively parallel virtual machine (grid computer) has the potential for providing cost-effective supercomputing and for encouraging international scientific collaboration by the sharing of data in a massive virtual data space. However, scientists in developing countries tend not to have access either to massive grid computers or to the kind of IT support which allows them to exploit inexpensive clusters of commodity workstations as local nodes within a collaborative grid. The proposed development can provide the Egyptian scientific community with a medium-scale Grid computer, and because of the time differences between Egypt and the U.S., machines at U.S. sites which collaborate with Egyptian scientists can be harnessed by Egypt during the off-hours at the U.S. end, and the same holds for U.S. use of Egyptian machines during off-hours at the Egyptian end. The US PI and the Egyptian collaborator have extensive experience in this area of research. One graduate student from the University of Connecticut will work on the project in Egypt. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual scientific interest.
