作者honu (給我華麗外科口罩)
看板SARS
標題[Sciencedaily]High-Tech Collaboration Helps Taiwan Fight SARS
時間Tue Jun 17 15:52:51 2003
Source: San Diego Supercomputer Center
Date: 2003-06-03
High-Tech Collaboration Helps Taiwan Fight SARS
When the medical staffs of several key hospitals in Taiwan were quarantined
by the SARS epidemic, threatening to make a critical situation even worse,
computer scientists there, in the U.S., and throughout the Asia Pacific Rim
turned to grid computing technology and old-fashioned teamwork. PRAGMA -- the
Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly -- showed how
relationships and expertise developed to tackle computational research could
also help thousands of SARS patients in Taiwan.
PRAGMA, an international collaboration consisting of fourteen founding
institutions, was launched at a March 2002 workshop hosted by the San Diego
Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). PRAGMA develops
grid-enabled applications and deploys high-tech infrastructure throughout the
Pacific Region, with the goal of sharing member institutions' data, computing
power, and other resources. In this case, the resource to be shared was PRAGMA
's expertise in network-based, high-performance teleconferencing.
PRAGMA Steering Committee member Fang-Pang Lin is director of the Grid
Computing Division of Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing
(NCHC), which is responsible for the national grid project of Taiwan. On May
15, he sent an e-mail to Peter Arzberger, director of the Life Sciences
Initiative at UCSD, and co-founder and chair of PRAGMA's Steering Committee.
Lin described how the suddenness and severity of the outbreak were overwhelming
the local health infrastructure. Doctors and staff are being quarantined inside
their own hospitals with SARS patients, to prevent the spread of the disease.
But the quarantines prevent attending physicians and specialists from
consulting with physicians at other institutions. The intention of NCHC was
to set up Access Grid teleconferencing stations inside and outside of
quarantined areas, enabling physicians to communicate with one another and
share high-resolution X-rays, diagnoses, and treatment methods.
A few hours later, the PRAGMA 4 Workshop Program Committee held a
teleconference, to discuss the seriousness of the problem and the need for
additional contributors to the fight against the outbreak of SARS. A request
for assistance was e-mailed to PRAGMA members immediately following the
teleconference.
The response was immediate. Within 12 hours, offers of assistance came from
many PRAGMA partners and other institutions around the world, and offers of
assistance have continued. These institutions included the Computer Network
Information Center (CNIC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), the Korea
Institute for Science and Technology Information (KISTI), Indiana University
and the NSF-funded TransPac project, SDSC, the National Center for Microscopy
and Imaging Research, as well as the National Biomedical Computation Resource
of UCSD, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Queensland
University of Technology, AARnet, Argonne National Laboratory and inSORS, and
the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology.
"We truly thank the program manager of PRAGMA, Teri Simas, for sending out
NCHC's call for Access Grid expertise in the international grid communities,"
said Grace Shau-Wei Hong, special assistant to the Grid Computing Division of
NCHC. The Access Grid is used at over 150 institutions worldwide.
Arzberger independently sent the message to Rick Stevens, director of
Mathematics and Computer Science at Argonne National Laboratory and professor
at the University of Chicago, and Terry Disz, head of the collaborative tools
effort at Argonne's Futures Lab. Stevens' response was immediate and direct:
"We're on it!"
A second videoteleconference was organized by PRAGMA on May 17 involving the
SARS Grid team at NCHC, Access Grid experts from Argonne and inSORS, and
experts on grids and portals at SDSC and UCSD.
NCHC had received direct calls for assistance from the staff of the Chang-Gung
Hospital system, who recognized NCHC's prior successes with the Asthma Grid, a
grid-based remote diagnosis for asthma patients. Three hospitals -- San-Chung
Hospital, Jen-Ai Hospital, and Chang-Gung Hospital at Linkou -- from north to
south in the greater Taipei area, had immediate need of a system for remote
diagnosis, quick access to specialized medical expertise, and a means of
sharing X-ray images, numerical instrument readings, and white board and
audio/video discussions. The system has to be scalable, since more hospitals
will join the system once its feasibility has been demonstrated and funding
and equipment become available.
(See map at
http://sarsgrid.nchc.gov.tw/index.cgi.)
(這個網頁超多照片的,可以翻翻)
Desktop-to-desktop teleconferencing targets individual communication,
transmits low-quality images, and uses ordinary telephone lines. On the
contrary, the Access Grid is based on grid computing technologies and
high-speed data networks. The Access Grid supports group-to-group interactions
across high-speed networks with large, high-resolution multimedia displays,
advanced interactive environments, and interfaces to grid middleware and
visualization environments. The Access Grid typically is used for virtual works
hops, collaborative education sessions, seminars, and tutorials. Group
conferences involving dozens of people at six or seven different sites are
common. "All of these capabilities made the Access Grid the logical choice for
hospitals in which entire teams of physicians need to consult," said Jer-Nan
Juang, director of NCHC.
The Access Grid itself was used to organize the virtual support team, which
includes participants from several PRAGMA member institutions. Their immediate
tasks were to provide real-time consulting expertise with Access Grid setup and
hands-on operations issues, and to expedite the response to an urgent situation.
And several urgent issues did require resolution.
Initial plans to use an Access Grid communications server in the United States
or Australia had to be revised when it was realized that quality-of-service
issues on the data communications network made it necessary to set up and run
a local server in Taiwan. A version 1.2 Access Grid server is being obtained
from inSORS Integrated Communications , Inc. of Chicago, an Access Grid
affiliate. But transportation disruptions stemming from the SARS outbreak have
delayed the arrival of this system
A less elaborate Access Grid version 2.0 "virtual venue server" (VVS) has been
adopted as a substitute solution, and it has been installed and tested. But
versions 2.0 and v1.2 are not compatible, and the VVS requires Access Grid
v2.0 client nodes at the hospital sites. Unfortunately, the current user
interface v2.0 is not suitable for a hospital environment. A new, high-level
user interface now is being developed by NCHC to meet hospitals' requirements.
The backup solution is to use support staff at the NCHC control center to
perform real-time manual handling of all teleconferencing sessions.
But these issues were challenges, not barriers. By May 19, the components of
the SARS Grid prototype had been assembled in record time. Three AG nodes were
installed and tested, with a commercial (H.323) teleconferencing system
available as a backup. The dedicated network for data communications between
sites was operational. Terry Disz, Tom Uram. Ivan Judson, and Ti Leggett of
Argonne National Laboratory provided real-time assistance on Access Grid issues.
Access Grid technology development at Argonne has been supported by DOE, NSF
and Microsoft.
By May 20, the Access Grid nodes had been delivered to San-Chung and Chang-Gung
Hospitals , installed, and tested by the afternoon of May 21. The network
connection between Jen-Ai Hospital and NCHC was successfully tested on May 22,
and on May 29 the Access Grid nodes were established in Jen-Ai Hospital and in
Taiwan's CDC. A second AG node for Jen-Ai Hospital is scheduled to be delivered
on June 1. A dedicated backbone network with 1 Gbps bandwidth has been deployed
for the SARS Grid by Chung-Hwa Telecom.
Nevertheless, much more remains to be done. Eventually, a dedicated backbone
network with 1 Gbps bandwidth will be deployed for the SARS Grid by Chung-Hwa
Telecom. The user interface issues will be overcome, permanent Access Grid nodes
will be set up, and more hospitals will be integrated into the system.
Patients' diagnostic records of SARS need to be archived under a system that
provides storage, retrieval, and viewing capabilities. A huge amount of data
has to be stored and accessed. One X-ray image can be digitized as between one
and 20 megabytes of data. If 3,000 patients have at least one X-ray image per
day during 30 days of observation, then roughly two terabytes of storage will
be needed. It may be feasible to use PRAGMA resources, such as the Storage
Research Broker (SRB) environment at the San Diego Supercomputer Center to
provide the necessary data storage.
PRAGMA members will meet in Melbourne , Australia, on June 5-6 to review
technical issues. In addition, NCHC members are expected to recount their
experiences with the SARS situation in Taiwan. Discussion topics will include
procedures for expanding the Access Grid to other Pacific Rim institutions and
the issue of how best to disseminate the lessons learned from dealing with the
SARS outbreak.
"Advanced cyberinfrastructure can assist with critical disease control and
emergency response needs," Dr. Lin said. "Thanks to PRAGMA, the alliance has
been formed. NCHC has a responsibility to assist in handling this arduous task,
and with assistance offered from the international grid community, we believe
that we can adequately contribute to the nationwide call to assist in fighting
the disease, relieving the epidemic, and ultimately save many lives."
At this point, SARS Grid nodes have been tested and are ready to assist the
medical staff at the three hospitals. Having the SARS Grid VTC system in place
will help researchers collaborate more fully with colleagues in the Pacific
Rim region, and will encourage broader use of the Access Grid by policy makers
and government officials in emergency response situations.
Editor's Note: The original news release can be found in
http://www.npaci.edu/online/v7.11/sars.html
(不知道有沒有照片中的人出現在這個版,我要崇拜他一下)
--
為什麼台灣沒有媒體寫出這樣的新聞呢?
--
冷風吹過 一扇窗戶邊 有個學生 就讀工學院 看著電腦 完全不厭倦
說的笑話 就像阿里山...白雪
考試快到 筆記沒半頁 所有軟體 都是大補帖
遇到朋友 打招呼也不會(不會hey hey 就是不會hey hey)
想要快樂 所以畫個Para Para Girl
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