Cyberinfrastructure for Smart and Connected Communities

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Abstract

Taiwan has been developing cyberinfrastructure for more than a decade. The unique feature is its centralised controlled infrastructure, which incorporates a 100G backbone research network, peta-scale storage and compute facilities. Yet, the facilities are physically distributed at three locations across the island. This virtually centralised, yet physically distributed network, provides a better synthesized cyberinfrastructure for innovative applications, such as IoT in the cloud.

The early effort can be traced back to 2003 and grid computing, which intends to consolidate distributed high performance computers into a single transparent one. There were two major emphasis — fast cycles and high throughput, which are correspondent to compute and data respectively. It led to the development of integration of sensors, sensor networks with HPC in Taiwan.

In the National Center for High-Performance Computing, we planned, built and operated such cyberinfrastructure as well as developed and demonstrated possible innovative applications. To list a few outstanding ones, there is the SARS Grid, which connects medical centers of Taiwan and provides virtual medical consultancy in time across different cities; Ecological Observational Grid, which connects six major long-term obervational ecological research sites across the island; and Disaster Mitigation Grid, which deploys and connects river mointoring field stations nationwide. Their impacts have been well recognised.

Our previous experience in cyberinfrastrcuture and its enabled applications inevitably leads to the current trends on IoT in the cloud and AI-based Big Data Analytics. Also, issues on system of systems and software defined architecture are all becoming even more crucial.

In this presentation, we will introduce our cyberinfrastrcuture development and its IoT applications, including the current extension on smart cities in domains of energy, traffic, disaster and health. The intersection of the domains is centred on how to form better smart and connected communties. We will share our collaborative approach to tackle these issues and also address the future challanges for such cyberinfrastructure.

About the speaker

Dr Fang-Pang Lin is the Director of Cloud Computing and System Integration Division at Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC). He is one of the key developers for developing the national cyberinfrastructure of Taiwan, namely Knowledge Innovation National Grid. He co-founded the Global Lake Ecological Observational Network and Global Coral Reef Environmental Observational Network.

His major research focuses on cyberinfrastructure for long-term environmental and ecological observation. Recent developments include the Taiwan Earth Science Observatory Knowledgebase, EU FP7 Fish4Knowledge collaboration, real-time wide area flood monitoring, and government big data. The efforts have led to US-East Asia collaborations to enable transnational cyberinfrastructure applications, which are based on shared software defined systems applying to issues of disaster management, environmental monitoring and simulation, and smart cities.

Dr Fang-Pang Lin obtained his PhD from the University of Wales at Swansea, U.K. He worked in the Rolls-Royce University Computing Centre in Oxford University for his postdoctoral research. He joined Taiwan's NCHC in 1997, and has been working in numerical simulation and software engineering regarding application integration. He was the winner of 2006's Outstanding Achievement Award in Science and Technology, the Executive Yuan of Taiwan.