GridCoord d 1

Annex C - Germany

History

In Germany, Grid Computing was largely dominated by the internationally visible Unicore project and by a large number of smaller projects. Grid systems research started already in the early 1990s, but public awareness was raised only much later with the deployment of the Unicore software.

In the late 1990s a number of small, decentralized and often unfunded Grid projects have been conducted, mostly with the goal to provide user-friendly access to remote HPC systems and clusters. Several names like metacomputing, hypercomputing, distributed supercomputing etc. have been coined, each of them denoting a slightly other flavour of what is called today Grid Computing. The emphasis was mainly on the coordinated use of HPC with the exception of the hypercomputing project, which aimed at the exploitation of distributed PCs for executing trivially parallel applications similar to SETI@home.

When the potential of the Grid as an enabling technology for e-Science and e-Business became clear, researchers started to organize themselves in standardization organizations. Several German groups contributed to GGF, OASIS, or IETF to the development of common standards. Links were established to Grid researchers in the US (Globus), Japan and Korea. Driven by the need for a unified user access to the supercomputers in Germany the Unicore project was initiated. The resulting software was successfully deployed and is now used nation-wide in many supercomputer centres and also abroad (mainly in Japan). Additional impact for Grid middleware came from EU projects with German participation.

Research Focus in the Past and Current

A wealth of know-how was developed over the years in Germany. Researchers are dispersed over different organizations (universities, science organizations, industry), but they are linked through a well-established personal network that guarantees a quick information flow. Research in small projects with changing group members improves the dissemination of results by means of use cases. Unicore and Globus are now the dominant software packages used in Germany. Web Services, WSRF and OGSI are used as major software programming platforms.

The importance of international connections was felt right from the beginning. Many German individuals and research groups participate in the following working and research groups of GGF: Grid Forum Advisory Committee, Grid Research Oversight Committee, Grid Checkpoint Recovery, Applications and Testbed Research Group, Applications and Testbed Research Group, Joshua Moore Life Science Grid, Preservation Environments Research Group, Simple API for Grid, Applications (SAGA) Research Group, OGSA Replication Services Working Group, Grid High-Performance Networking, Grid Resource Allocation Agreement Protocol, Transaction Management Research Group, Distributed Resource Management API, Grid Scheduling Architecture Research Group

Several workshops in Germany provide a platform for cooperation and collaboration. Among many smaller events, the following workshops have been organized during the past few years: Stuttgart Metacomputing Workshops (annually since 1998), seminars at Schloss Dagstuhl on Metacomputer Management (2002) and Future Generation Grids (2004), e-Science conference series with industry participation (2003, 2004), international conferences like CCGrid 2002, GGF-10 2004, and many more.

Funding Structure and Coordination

Before 2005, there was no coherent national funding strategy on Grid Computing. Several research projects, most prominently Unicore, were funded by the “Software Systems Department” of the German Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF). Additional funding came through the German Research Network (DFN Verein) which itself is funded through BMBF’s “Internet Department”. Most of the DFN projects were targeted at enhancing network protocols (B-WIN, G-WIN, X-WIN) for the specific needs in the Grid. Additionally, DFN supported studies and software developments for Grid applications (http://www.dfn.de/content/entwicklungen/abgeschlosseneprojekte/).

On a regional scale, some state governments supported projects aiming at the utilization of distributed computing equipment. The “Northrhine-Westphalian Metacomputer” is one such project. Here, the emphasis was put on linking university computer services to allow for a better utilization of local resources. The state of Baden-Württemberg has recently established a centre of competence in high performance computing (www.hkz-bw.de/en/) which has a focus on Grid computing.

Additional funding came from some major German science organisations like FhG (Fraunhofer Resource Grid) or HGF (GridKa), which are also funded through BMBF. However, this money is not generally available for partners that are extern to FhG or HGF. Only recently the funding regime was slightly relaxed to allow for a better cooperation between the big science organizations (mainly HGF) and universities.

From 2005 on, the funding and governance of national Grid projects will become more focussed in Germany. A steering committee for the D-Grid projects will be established that checks for coherence among the various application-driven and the middleware-driven projects.

In 2003/2004, German Grid researchers organized into an (informal) national D-Grid consortium. The consortium established a steering committee, which developed a strategy and a research framework for establishing e-Science in Germany. The BMBF adopted the research framework and compiled a first call for proposals.

The resulting D-Grid projects are structured as follows: There will be one horizontally organized “integration project” and three to five vertically organized “community projects”. The community projects will be the driving forces. The integration project will take up the results (and software) of the community projects and will consolidate and integrate them into a national Grid environment which will become the basis for several overlay Grids for the different science communities. The first community projects will cover the domains climate and earth sciences, medicine and bioinformatics, high-energy and astrophysics, computational sciences and engineering, and humanities and social sciences. An additional call for proposals covers the area of information and knowledge management.

Links to Industry and Business

Unicore was, from the beginning on, supported by many hard- and software vendors: Cray, Fujitsu-Siemens, Genias (later taken over by SUN), Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Platform, Pallas (later taken over by Intel), SGI, SUN, T-Systems. Many of them participate in the Unicore Forum, an open, non-profit association which promotes the development and distribution of the Unicore Grid system (www.unicore.org/forum.htm). Additional industrial partners participate in the D-Grid initiative with the aim to benefit from know-how and available technology.

Future Activities

Grid technology is increasingly regarded as an important enabling technology for e-Science. However, this is only the first step. It is clearly understood in society and politics that businesses will also benefit (e-Business) by Grid technology, which will result in new jobs and an increased competitiveness. The BMBF therefore also funds projects with economy-related topics (Grid Economy, Grid Business) and value added business chains with an emphasis on workflow and business models for SMEs.

The D-Grid strategy paper (www.d-grid.de) sets a first step toward a coherent German Grid strategy. Formulated by the D-Grid steering committee on behalf of the German D-Grid community, it provides a roadmap on Grid R&D in Germany. This roadmap was put into action with the first call for D-Grid proposals published by the BMBF in autumn 2004. All proposals have been evaluated and those selected for funding will start in 2005. Additional to the first D-Grid call, a parallel call on e-Science projects in information science and digital libraries was issued by the Digital Libraries BMBF Department.