Organizing by the ASGC (Academia Sinca Grid Computing Centre), the “International Symposium on Grid Computing (ISGC) 2006: Collaboration & Interoperation” will be held in Academia Sinica, Taiwan again from 1 to 4 May 2006. The ISGC is the premier international forum in Asia Pacific for the information exchange and global collaboration between various Grid projects.

The ISGC aims to promote the awareness of the global Grid operation and collaboration between Asia Pacific region and the world. It also provides a forum for the potential developers, users in Asia Pacific to meet and to share from each other. By exchanging their experiences on know to develop Grid technology and application, this Symposium would provide the Asia Pacific Grid community with invaluable insights for future collaboration.

The main focus of 2006 program is to introduce the world-wide Grid collaboration and interoperation among those projects. It covers a variety of presentation ranging from applications on High Energy Physics, Bio/Medicine, Earth Science, Data Grid to Grid technology, middleware, operation, management & services as well.

The global Grid infrastructure is being established to store and analyze the unprecedented amount of data – tens of millions of Gigabytes per year; thus, the international collaboration has become more essential. Academia Sinica has signed the WLCG MoU (World-wide LHC Computing Grid) with CERN on 9 December 2005. The signing of the MoU enables Taiwan to become one of the 11 Tier-1 centres to provide services, coordination and support for WLCG with TRIUMF in Canada, CC-IN2P3 in France, GridKA in Germany, CNAF in Italy, NIKHEF/SARA in Netherlands, NDGF of Nordic Federation, PIC in Spain, RAL in UK, BNL and FNAL in the US.

By 2008, WLCG will integrate the equivalent of over one hundred thousand of today’s PCs from hundreds of institutes into a computing and data Grid system. Serving as AP CIC/ROC (Core Infrastructure Centre / Regional Operation Centre) and GGUS (Global Grid User Support), ASGC is devoted to build the next generation research infrastructure and induct more application such as Digital Archives, Atmospheric Sciences, as well as Bio-medicine into the WLCG middleware infrastructure.