Grids and clouds in ITB

Abstract

Before Grids and Clouds, Cluster Computing is the most used parallel computing system in Indonesia. One of the obstacles to overcome is that Universities in Indonesia do not have sophisticated infrastructure for doing the research. In ITB, for example, there are Clusters in some research groups that are used for specific purposes such as Weather Forecasting, computational Chemistry, and Molecular Computation. The Grid Computing development in Indonesia was started in 2006 by several universities. The development continued when ITB joined EUAsiaGrid Project and connected Indonesia Grid to International Grid Infrastructures. Some research to port existing applications has been conducted but not yet able to deliver the expected result. Training also has been held to spread the knowledge on Grid Computing, in order to have more human resources that are able to administer grid systems and to use the grid to support their research activities. Research on Grid computing focused on integrating the existing Cluster Computing to Grid Infrastructure. One Cluster has been successfully integrated as part of Grid ITB Site, but this cluster could not become production ready since it is being used by students to experiment the integration of the cluster to Grid Infrastructure. In order to stabilize the Grid Site, ITB is going to rebuild the ITB Grid Site system. The previous system has to be upgraded to be able to give better performance. ITB has decided to build the grid infrastructure and cloud computing based on GPUs (Graphical Processing Unit) with 3200 GPU cores installed. Meanwhile for the application we are going to scale up the weather prediction models for Indonesia region.