The China Education and Research Grid -- the most ambitious grid project by a government to date -- is being launched this month with six universities to start with, and it will link more than 200,000 students and faculty members at nearly a hundred universities across China when the project is completed.

When phase one of the project is completed in 2005, the grid will perform more than six teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second, and eventually will be capable of more than 15 trillion calculations per second.

The China grid will simplify how students and researchers access education and computing resources across China. Universities will be connected to a common virtual hub that automatically finds the appropriate application resources, from life sciences research to video courses and e-learning.

"Grid computing, and the concept of virtualization at its core, is a key element in building an on demand business," says Dr. George Wang, director, IBM China Software Development Laboratory and IBM China Research and Development Laboratory, IBM Greater China Group. "WebSphere software helps a grid gather untapped computing capabilities and functionalities and make it available to users across the grid as needed. IBM leads Grid computing in China and around the world to help customers realize substantial business benefit by sharing and optimizing their existing IT infrastructure using IBM technologies."

Using a grid built on IBM's WebSphere, China's universities can organize computational and informational resources of its entire higher educational system into a centralized, Internet-based hub to perform a wide range of complex tasks instantaneously. A specific request -- such as a complex protein-folding computation for infectious disease research -- can be pushed onto the grid, automatically seek out an application at another campus that knows how to handle the computation, and feed it back to the original computer.

The technology has been deployed in Peking University, South China University of Technology, Tsinghua University, the University of Hong Kong, Xi'an Jiaotong University and Sun Yat-sen University. Other universities involved in phase one of the project are Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Northeast University, Shandong University, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Southeast University.

IBM will work closely with China's Ministry of Education on completion, application development and training and also teach students how to develop applications for and manage the grid. The Ministry of Education and universities involved in the grid project also will have advanced access to new grid technologies from IBM.