The Australian Research Council (ARC), an Australian equivalent of the NSF, recently awarded more than $3.5 milliion over the next couple of years for grid computing technologies aimed to increase medical research collaboration. One key beneficiary of the grant, Dr. Andrew Lonie of the University of Melbourne, will be using his share of the funds to work on the international Physiome Project, the successor to the Human Genome effort, which has a goal to

describe the human organism quantitatively, so that one can understand its physiology and pathophysiology, and to use this understanding to improve human health.

As part of this new ongoing effort, Dr. Lonie’s research centers around modeling and simulation of the human kidney, via the Kidney Simulation Project.

Continued funding for grid technologies and the maturation of high-speed networking will boost opportunities for international reearch collaboration and engagement. The result will be the ability to link the worlds foremost authorities in medical science to massive amounts of data, which will ultimately lead to quicker solutions to, and better treatment for, both local and global health issues.

New York University reported last week that they are the first American university to provide IPv6 to a supercomputer. IPv6, created to supplant the ageing IPv4, is slowly but surely making its way into the cyberinfrastructure fabric. The NYU system, an IBM eServer ranked 117th on the latest Top500 list, is the flagship system of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and has a peak performance of 4.5 Teraflops.

Connecting this system to the NYSERNet network in New York state is providing enormous collaborative opportunities to the other New York academic institutions and is another great example of critical partnerships. This new supercomputer is the result of a partnership between IBM, NYU, the US Army and Navy.

For more information, see the NYU press release or this release sent to and posted by Internet2.

NSF recently awarded a group of universities $10 million over five years to set up and operate a grid that will allow researchers and students to access physics data produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The Data Intensive Science University Network, or DISUN for short, will provide access to results from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which will account for a portion of the petabytes of data produced by the Collider annually. The CMS effort will also contribute to other grid projects including the Open Science Grid.

More detailed information about the project can be found in Supercomputing Online’s story about DISUN from last week.

This article from today’s Chronicle of Higher Education announces plans for the two largest, university based networks to merge. The merger plan is a response to a report by 11 networking experts, commissioned jointly by the groups. That report states:

“We believe and recommend that NLR and Internet2 should combine their efforts. The goal, we believe, must be a single national entity responsible for the collective high-performance production-networking and experimental-networking needs of higher education and the larger research community.”

Of course, the realities of a merger might be more complicated. As the article states, “leaders of both organizations warned that merger talks could founder over financial and bureaucratic issues. ”

Note: The Chronicle often requires a password to get at articles. Anyone who wants to see this article, but can’t get to it, just leave a comment and I’ll pass it along.

Today’s Federal Computer Week includes a story about an NSF-funded research project being done by David Clark of MIT. Clark, according to FCW, will be conducting a preliminary study into what computer scientists can do to create a new Internet architecture. In the long run, it seems that this effort is an attempt to answer the question “If we knew back then what we know now, what would we have done differently?” Also from the story: “NSF’s agenda includes a proposal for creating a new office devoted to cyber infrastructure. But the agency’s tight budget could thwart such projects, some observers say.”

In case you didn’t know about it, the Pan European research and education network, aka GÉANT2, is having a launch celebration this week for what is being promoted as the next generation of research and educational networking in Europe. Touting 500 Gbps performance, this enormous meta-network is managed by the non-profit, UK-based DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), which is charged with building and maintaining networks in Europe and globally for the research and education community. GÉANT2 consists of 30 national research and education networks (NRENs) that link as many as 34 countries and enables collaboration not just across Europe, but also around the planet. In fact, according to this very informative article about the network from the European site EduBourse,

it provides the highest capacity and offers the greatest geographic coverage of any network of its kind in the world.

Such a network represents a giant step in linking global research institutions, which should go a long way toward providing resources and services to those researchers who previously didn’t have access. And it should open up a new “data highway” for the ability to share the massive volumes of data being created with these new resources.

Visit the GÉANT2 website http://www.geant2.net for more information.