The Kajima Corporation (Kajima; Mitsuyoshi Nakamura, CEO) and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST; Dr. Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, President), in an effort to promote the effective and integrated use of computers for making technical computing at Kajima, commenced joint research in April 2006 related to the GridASP^TM developed at AIST and associated use technologies.

This joint research is being undertaken at the "Akihabara Satellite Lab" that Kajima established as a research center within "Akihabara Crossfield" in September 2005.

This marks the first time that in the construction industry that a full-scale grid environment has been established in a company. This is also the first time that GridASP developed by AIST has been applied to an in-house grid portal.

Kajima uses supercomputers to analyze high-rise buildings, civil engineering works, and other structures. With the increased construction of aseismic and seismic-resistant structures in recent years, there has also been a concerted introduction of environmentally-sound natural ventilation systems and other advancements, so computer analyses are becoming increasingly important. Progress is also being made to expand the complexity and scale of these analyses.

Against this backdrop, more analyses are requiring extremely large computing power, so demand has been rising to create a grid environment using a company's computer resources (CPUs and disk spaces) for technical computing.

At the same time, the AIST has been working hard on the research and development of grid technology that can virtualize various types of resources such as supercomputers, and deployment to industrial uses. This is especially the case for technical computing services for business fields, where the business model GridASP has been proposed as a means of providing utility services by linking resource providers, application providers, and the portal companies that connect these providers to users.

With the deployment of GridASP in the technical computing environment of Kajima, an in-house grid portal will be constructed, and a full-scale grid environment achieved, within the company. The joint research is designed to create an analysis environment and improve the utility of computer resources through an in-house grid portal. A three-tiered structure in GridASP comprised of resource providers, application providers, and the portal companies that connect these providers with users, will be respectively operated by computer managers, software developers, and IT supervisors within the same company. After a grid environment of the computer systems (Hitachi SR11000, HA8000, and NEC SX-8) is created, the construction of a grid portal will involve using the GridASP Toolkit developed at AIST. For a while the HA8000 computers are targets of the grid portal.

Once this is accomplished, in-house computer resources (CPUs, and disk spaces) for technical computing can be efficiently utilized for more voluminous, more complex and larger scale analyses of high-rise buildings, civil engineering works, and other structures. Furthermore, the status of the analyses will be easy to understand, and usability will be greatly improved.

To promote greater integration of analysis technologies at Kajima, the development of a streamlined operational model is being considered for computer resources in the environment being created in this research. Furthermore, to minimize investment and maximize operational efficiency, the research project may even consider utilizing outside computer resources provided by other company.

Furthermore, AIST is planning to use GridASP Toolkit to improve grid portal models, construction methods, etc., in the company by referring to the data on the effectiveness and operational conditions of the grid portal introduced at Kajima. There are also plans to fuse the portals that provide access between in-house grid portals and computer resources outside the company to create a more flexible analysis environment.