Read More -> The GridBox Consortium (www.gridbox.co.uk)

The GridBox Consortium was formed in February 2005 as a commercial organization to provide specialised storage solutions (Storage Element - SE) for GRID systems.

As GRID systems gain more and more recognition as the future of distributed network services, there is a need for specialised hardware to efficiently handle the vast amount of data that these systems require.

The GridBox Consortium bases its initial offerings on the prototype GridBox servers developed by Zybert Computing for the European Mammogrid Project.

The Particle Physics Community is one of the main forces behind GRID technology and the GridBox Consortium collaborates with the Particle Physics Group of the University of Birmingham who act as official advisors of the Consortium.

GRIDBOX from ZYBERT Computing Ltd.

(25 Sep 2003, Birmingham)

Last week ZYBERT Computing installed the first of their GridBox series servers at CERN in Geneva - to be the first GRID node in the MammoGrid project - EU funded and CERN coordinated project to use GRID technology for Europe-wide sharing of medical images.

GridBox Z1G is a rack mounted high performance server. It is based on Intel architecture and Linux operating system. The model installed at CERN has 720GB of RAID mirrored disks space (total of 1.5TB, upgradeable to 2.5TB by just inserting more disks.) All conformance and performance tests were satifactory. GridBox can deliver 126MB/s of data from disk over Gb network to multiple clients. Three more GridBox servers are being ordered from ZYBERT Computing now and will be delivered this year to hospitals in Oxford, Cambridge and Udine (Italy).

(CERN is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research located on the Swiss - French border in Geneva)

MammoGrid Project

The aim of the recently EU-funded MammoGrid project is, in the light of emerging Grid technology, to develop a European-wide database of mammograms that will be used to develop a set of important healthcare applications and investigate the potential of this Grid to support effective co-working between healthcare professionals throughout the EU.

The MammoGrid consortium intends to use a Grid model to enable distributed computing that spans national borders. This Grid infrastructure will be used for deploying novel algorithms as software directly developed or enhanced within the project. Using the MammoGrid clinicians will be able to harness the use of massive amounts of medical image data to perform epidemiological studies, advanced image processing, radiographic education and ultimately, tele-diagnosis over communities of medical "virtual organisations".

This is achieved through the use of Grid-compliant services for managing (versions of) massively distributed files of mammograms, for handling the distributed execution of mammograms analysis software, for the development of Grid-aware algorithms and for the sharing of resources between multiple collaborating medical centres. All this is delivered via a novel software and hardware information infrastructure that, in addition guarantees the integrity and security of the medical data.

The MammoGrid implementation is based on AliEn, a Grid framework developed by the ALICE Collaboration. AliEn provides a virtual file catalogue that allows transparent access to distributed data-sets and provides top to bottom implementation of a lightweight Grid applicable to cases when handling of a large number of files is required.