Asia@home storms brains in Taipei

Ni hao!

Here's the first report LIVE from ISGC 2010, courtesy of francois@home.

I arrived in steaming hot Taipei last night on a direct flight from freezing cold Beijing. Today I helped to organize a special Asia@home brainstorming session at ISGC. The goal of Asia@home is to encourage researchers in Asia to use volunteer computing and volunteer thinking technologies for their research (think SETI@home and Stardust@Home).

We started the session with presentations by Derrick Kondo of INRIA (FR) talking about volunteer computing and clouds, and clever ways to combine the two. This was followed by Daniel Lombrana of U. Extremadura (ES) talking about Jarifa, a neat approach to using the volunteer computing platform BOINC to build a campus grid.

The brainstorming was a chance to follow up on the seeds sown at an Asia@home workshop we held here a year ago at ISGC 2009. Simon Lin, the host of the ISGC conferences and an enthusiastic supporter of Asia@home, has got a young team here working on a number of exciting projects. You can listen to them introduce themselves and their work in the video below.

I'll fill you in on some of the cool ideas generated by this brainstorming in my next GridCast entry.