The Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC) in Taipei is currently the only LCG Tier-1 Centre in the Asia-Pacific area, with 400 KSI2K computing capacity, 50 TB disk space and a 35 TB tape library dedicated to the LCG. Since 2004, Academia Sinica has provided the services of a regional operation centre (ROC), site monitoring, virtual-organization (VO) support, middleware deployment, certificate authority (CA) and global Grid-user support (GGUS - mainly first-line support and FAQs). The centre supports not only local Tier-2 sites, but also Grid operations in South Korea, Singapore and other Asia-Pacific countries that are not supported by other Tier-1 sites.
To support service and data challenges, a maximum 1.6 Gbit/s transmission rate was achieved in the 2 Gbit network bandwidth between CERN and Taipei in June 2005. During the CMS service challenge, ASGC received 20 TB of data from CERN at an average rate of 56 Mbit/s from 14 July to 14 August. The ASGC Tier-1 Centre provided 12% of the LCG-2 computing jobs, second only to the 14% of CERN in the ATLAS data challenge in 2004. Academia Sinica will work closely with Tokyo University and other Tier-2 sites in this region for the ATLAS and CMS service challenges in the near future.
ASGC is engaging in collaboration and sharing of information by taking advantage of e-science applications in the Asia-Pacific area. ASGC is also working with different partners to help form and support application-driven e-science communities in the Asia-Pacific region, to improve the next-generation research infrastructure and build up the e-science applications. Hosting the International Symposium on Grid Computing (ISGC) since 2003, Academia Sinica provides a platform for the co-operation of the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and America.
In addition to applications from high-energy physics, such as the ATLAS and CMS applications running locally, the centre also supports the biomedical VO in EGEE. Local VO services for users of the TWGrid include bio-informatics, atmospheric-sciences applications, earth sciences and digital libraries. Another VO for general applications in the Asia-Pacific region is currently being constructed.
In total, 30 staff take care of Grid technology, application development, operations, deployment and support for the users. For phase two of the EGEE project, ASGC will extend its partnership to the areas of middleware re-engineering and integration (JRA1), training (NA3) and outreach (NA2), while keeping a strong presence in operations (SA1) and application support (NA4).