APAN Member Highlights

ASGC Intro & It’s brief international collaboration and starting of ISGC

In the early 1990s, Academia Sinica participated in High Energy Physics research at the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the Radio Telescope in California. Since the experiments of the real-time monitoring and remote control of the telescope, a dedicated international research network became indispensable. Dr. Simon C. Lin, previous Director of Academia Sinica Computing Center advocated building a self-owned research network rather than just buying bandwidth.

In 1991, a network between Academia Sinica and California, US, was established to facilitate the sharing of resources. It was also the first dedicated international Research Network of Taiwan. Understanding the importance of Research Network infrastructure, Dr. Lin drew up an unprecedented plan with NCHC (National Center for High-Performance Computing) and MOE (Ministry of Education) to set up a T3 connection linked to STAR TAP in Chicago in 1995, which increased the bandwidth of the international research network bandwidth by 30 times in 1997. This prompted Taiwan to strengthen its global research collaboration with United States, Canada, Japan, Singapore, European region as well as other countries and regions. In 2007, Taiwan’s first 10G Research Network was also established.

In the 1990s, the world's advanced countries all participated in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest high-energy physics accelerator built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) was designed to store and analyze the massive amount of data produced by LHC. In 2002, the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC) started participating in WLCG. Year 2005, Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Yuan-Tseh Lee, also President of Academia Sinica, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with CERN, making ASGC one of only ten WLCG Tier-1 sites worldwide and the only one in the Asia-Pacific region.

Through WLCG's global infrastructure, Taiwan established its long-term partnership with the EU projects and U.S. Open Science Grid in 2004. Since then, ASGC has been promoting different e-Science applications such as Avian Flu/Dengue Fever drug discovery, earthquake simulation, etc. among Asian countries in order to put the concept of "e-Science for the Masses" into practice.

In cooperation with Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics (also known as INFN), ASGC started implementing the EUAsiaGrid project in Asia since 2008. Seventeen institutions, including 14 Asian-Pacific institutions, joined this project, which also received the highest rating among various regional e-Science projects in the European Commission (EC). Furthermore, since 2010, ASGC has been the lead partner of the Asia Pacific Grid Initiative (AGPI) initiated by EGI-InSPIRE.

ASGC has committed to the operation of e-Science infrastructure as well as development of e-Science applications. In order to foster new talents, ASGC has not only organized training courses and workshops in all fields, but also hosting the "International Symposium on Grids and Clouds" (ISGC) as an annual event in every spring since 2003.

Throughout 18 years, ISGC has transformed from a mainly domestic conference into an international symposium that brings together participants from more than thirty countries. The thematic focus has also shifted from grid operation and high-energy physics to the integration of new distributed computing technologies and a great variety of e-Science applications.

ASGC also hosted APAN 20 (2005) and APAN 38 (2014) in Taiwan.

International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2021 & 2022

March 22-26, 2021, the ISGC 2021 (International Symposium on Grids and Clouds 2021) has fulfilled with satisfaction. Due to the strong impact of COVID-19 pandemic, ISGC held its first virtual conference in 19 years. It was an enthusiastic achievement with total of 299 registrants from 35 countries; over one hundred presentations were given among the program consists of five co-located events and eight-topic sessions in the hours that across three different regions.

The ISGC 2022 annual conference will be held again at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, from 20 to 25 March 2022, with co-located events and workshops. More conference information and Call-for-Paper announcement will be circulate in Mid-September.

The ultimate goal of ISGC has always been to create a face-to-face venue where individual communities and national representatives can present and share their contributions to the global puzzle and contribute thus to the solution of global challenges. ISGC is also for regional and global collaborations on common interests from infrastructure, platform, and services to applications.

In advance, we hereby cordially invite and welcome all your participation in 2022! All ISGC annual conference since 2003 can be find here for your reference.