UIA

 

High-speed fibreoptic link for university

Monday September 6, 2010

ULTRA-FAST LINK: Mimos Berhad chief operating officer Aziz Kadir (left) and Prof Dr Ahmad Faris at the launch of the dedicated 4Gbps high speed single mode fiber optics link between Mimos and IIUM in Kuala Lumpur.

KUALA LUMPUR: R&D organisation Mimos Bhd is now linked to the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) with a high-speed fibreoptic line.

The 4Gbps (gigabits per second) line will enable the university's lecturers and students to better conduct their scientific and software-engineering research activities, at no charge.

Mimos provides grid services, which masses the power of hundreds of computing devices into a single network, that can be used to tackle massive number-crunching tasks, such as those done by animation, engineering and bio-informatics applications.

The link comes under a project, called Ultra-Fast Link for Advanced Research, by Mimos and IIUM.

"We will enjoy faster rendering of our animations, as well as be able to run (scientific) simulations more effectively," said Prof Dr Ahmad Faris Ismail, deputy rector for research and innovation at the university.

"All these activities can be done from the IIUM campus in Gombak without having to physically submit the tasks at the Mimos facility in Technology Park Malaysia (many kilometres away)."

The IIUM invested about RM250,000 in the project, on hardware and software.

The Mimos grid consists of 256 CPUs (central processing units) to run animation programs and 256 CPUs for weather simulations. For bio-informatics, there are 64 CPUs while 128 CPUs are available for processing fluid-dynamics simulations.

IIUM will next start working on a disaster-recovery programme and business-continuity planning with Mimos, and this will be followed by the university engaging cloud-computing services. No details were made available.

This is the second link between IIUM and Mimos. In 2007, a dedicated online link was established to enable the university to research information security, using Mimos facilities.

The research involved encryption-key management, encryption algorithms and hardware encryption modules, and more.