The information infrastructure is providing a variety of tools for autonomous data movement, replication and optimised access, data virtualisation and metadata support. An SRB federation has been implemented to support access to distributed data sets.
Portals for applications to access the National Grid are being developed using the GridSphere toolkit. Generic portlets have been developed for common procedures such as authentication, file transfer and job submission. Plans are being developed to provide a rendering engine for visualization and supporting simultaneous viewing across multiple sites.
Australian researchers have access to a number of Access Grid nodes and considerable effort has been contributed by the APAC partners and other groups to improve the robustness, management, usability and accessibility of these facilities. This effort is being extended in the APAC Grid program to enable these nodes to be used as instrument control rooms, distributed visualisation facilities and collaborative work environments.
Plans are being developed for the APAC partners to be connected by a high-speed private network. Currently most the partners are connected by the GrangeNet experimental network 4. This will be replaced by a network configured on the new national backbone network being installed by AARNet5.
