This award supports the participation of eleven US computer scientists and a graduate student in a workshop with Australian counterparts to discuss desirable characteristics and capabilities of Grid supercomputing and areas for future collaboration that will benefit from these advanced capabilities. The co-organizers of the meeting are Dr. Radha Nandkumar and Dr. Daniel Reed, Director of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Dr. John O'Callaghan of the Australian National University, who is Executive Director of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC.) The workshop will be held following the annual meeting of APAC in Queensland, Australia, which will be attended by representatives of all significant supercomputer user groups among Australian academic institutions as well as the CSIRO. The U.S. participants will come from the NCSA and other NSF TerraGrid sites. Australia has recently begun a Grid initiative. This workshop provides the opportunity to define future complementary development activities that will ensure that the grid infrastructures being built in the U.S. and Australia can support and provide a testing ground for interoperability. It will catalyze joint projects and demonstrations and enhance the benefits of grid computing by sharing and integrating the intellectual resources of the two countries.
Broader Impacts
An important outcome of the workshop will be to strengthen connections among the supercomputer and grid users of Australia and the U.S. This stronger relationship will facilitate international research opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral/early career scientists of the two countries. It will also leverage the expertise of the two research communities to promote the solution of complex truly global scale problems in a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines.
