During the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus outbreak in Taiwan, Argonne’s Access Grid technology enabled radiologists from across the country to review patients’ X-rays without added risk of infection. Three members of Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division assisted in the fast deployment of the specialized Grid.

Access Grid technology, conceived and developed at Argonne, connects people across town or around the world to interact and exchange ideas with each other in real time through high-resolution video and voice over the Internet. Each “node” in the grid may be able to display a dozen or more real-time images of other users, documents, Web sites and other useful data.

Normally, laboratory and academic groups use the Access Grid for training, conferences and workshops, site visits and formal reviews. It also supports ongoing research and scientific collaboration and is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

The SARS Grid helped prove the technology has a future for medical applications.

“We’ve long thought this might be the right technology for rural areas, where the residents might not have access to medical specialists,” said Experimental Systems Engineer Terry Disz of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division. “The deployment of our technology to support this effort was pretty exciting.”

SARS infected more than 8,000 people around the world in its 2003 outbreak. The virus causes a high fever and a dry cough, followed by an accumulation of fluid in the lungs that causes difficulty breathing. The mortality rate is less than 5 percent for healthy adults, but it can be as high as 55 percent in the elderly.

As the Taiwan outbreak was beginning to peak in mid-May, with hundreds of people infected, Taiwan’s National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) was finishing setting up its Access Grid node. Scientists there realized the Access Grid could be used for medical information management—especially the sharing of high-resolution X-rays of SARS patients. Patients are monitored with daily chest X-rays that reveal the extent of fluid accumulation in the lungs. Each patient’s treatment may last a month.

“As you can see, it was one heck of a lot of X-ray data,” said Disz. “There weren’t enough diagnosticians on the island to keep up with the demand. Understandably, medical personnel in other countries were reluctant to travel to the scene of the outbreak.”

Access Grid technology offered a way for radiologists in Taiwan to share X-ray data with diagnosticians at other hospitals without risking the doctors’ health.

NCHC employees worked around the clock to set up basic Access Grid nodes at several hospitals and at Taiwan’s Center of Disease Control. The unprecedented urgency led them to request the aid of Argonne computer scientists who helped develop the technology. A late-night conference call was set up: Disz, Tom Uram and Ivan Judson from Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division provided NCHC experts with guidance on installing and configuring the latest version of the Access Grid software. Uram stayed in e-mail contact as the project progressed.

“They were able to reach an operational state quickly, which I attribute to improvements in our software and their hard work,” Uram said.

New Globus Toolkit
Globus software powers Grid computing. The newest version, Globus Toolkit 3.0, was released in 2003 and introduces support for the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI), a new technical standard developed within the Global Grid Forum.

OGSI combines Globus Toolkit technologies with industry-standard “Web services” to provide powerful interfaces that facilitate sharing of resources such as computers, instrumentation, data, storage and networks. With Globus Toolkit version 3.0, people can share computing power, databases and other tools securely online across corporate, institutional and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy.

The Globus Toolkit is a product of the Globus Project. The Globus Project is led by Argonne’s Ian Foster, Mathematics and Computer Science Division’s associate division director and professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, Carl Kesselman, director of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, and Steve Tuecke, lead architect of the Globus Project at Argonne’s Distributed Systems Laboratory.

Globus Project partners include the UK e-Science Program and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. IBM Corp. and Platform Computing are providing code for the Globus Toolkit 3.0.

Globus Project sponsors include the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Microsoft and IBM.

“The Internet is about getting computers to talk together; Grid computing is about getting computers to work together,” said Tom Hawk, IBM’s general manager of Grid computing. “The introduction of the Globus Toolkit 3.0 with the Open Grid Services Architecture is an important step in moving Grid computing beyond the laboratories of academia and research and through the doors of commercial enterprises.”

See www.globus.org

For more information, please contact David Jacqué.

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