Grid computing takes on Google

Software firm Imense has formed an unlikely partnership with a group of particle physicists to use a computer grid to take on Google's image search function.

With some 15 billion images online, pictures and video make up 70 per cent of digital data on the internet, but standard search engines still rely on text descriptions. Imense's software analyses images for their content, rather than relying on human-inputted descriptions.

"We built a prototype of our new image analysis and search technology, but simply weren't able to test our software on sufficiently large numbers of photos," said Dr David Sinclair, one of the founders of Imense. "We knew we could search tens of thousands of pictures, but couldn't afford to try it on hundreds of thousands or millions of images. This made it difficult for Imense to get the investment we needed to develop a commercially viable product. That's where our partnership with the particle physics grid came in."

Imense was allowed use of the UK particle physics grid (GridPP), which is spread across 17 sites and used to analyse petabytes of data from the Large Hadron Collider - a particle accelerator based at Cern. The grid's 8,000 computers have previously been shared with other researchers, from geophysicists to biologists.

"We actively encourage the researchers we fund to consider the wider applications of the work they do," Professor Keith Mason, chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). "In this case, computing problems that had to be addressed for particle physics can also be used to solve other challenges with large amounts of data."

But it's not just about computing power. One of the members of the particle physics team, Professor Andy Parker, the director of the eScience Centre at the University of Cambridge, said his team even helped Imense with their software development. "Our team helped Imense develop their software to run on the grid using a tool called Ganga, and supported them as they analysed three million images," said Parker. "We also dealt with issues such as security and working with grid managers at other universities, who were very helpful."

The STFC's Knowledge Exchange Service helped bring the physicists and software developers together and provided some funding, which has been since surpassed ten-fold by new £500,000 investment in Imense.

"Our work with the grid has let us demonstrate that our software can handle millions of images, at a time when we were a small company and couldn't supply the computing power needed ourselves. This in turn impressed the investors we spoke to, and led to funding for our company," said Dr Sinclair, adding that Imense plans to use open source grid technology in its final commercial service, expected to be launched in the coming months.

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