GridCoord d 1

Annex D - Hungary

Short History

Grid activities have been funded in Hungary since 2000 but they were recognised as really important R&D activities only by the beginning of 2003. In March 2003 the five most active Grid centres of Hungary established the Hungarian Grid Competence Centre (MGKK) in order to intensively promote and coordinate high-quality research and development activities in the field of Grid computing at a national level (www.mgkk.hu ). The other main aim of MGKK is to create a knowledge centre in Grid technology where the available critical mass enables the intensive support of establishing and operating nation-wide Grid infrastructures for the benefit of the whole Hungarian academic community. MGKK provides consultancy in Grid computing also for the business and government sectors in order to accelerate the employment of the leading edge Grid technology in companies and governmental institutions.

MGKK is an alliance of the following five Hungarian institutions:

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  Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (SZTAKI)
  
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  Eötvös Lóránd University of Science, Budapest (ELTE)
  
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  Office for National Information and Infrastructure Development (NIIFI)
  
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  KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (RMKI)
  
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  Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME)
  

In the beginning of 2004 MGKK created a proposal for a national Grid initiative that was discussed by the president and several high-rank officers of the major R&D funding body of Hungary. Though the proposal was welcomed, unfortunately, the economic situation of the country was not suitable at that time to launch such a new national initiative.

Since that time the major R&D funding body was reorganized under the new name National Office for Research and Technology (NKTH) (http://www.nkth.gov.hu/main.php?folderID=775). NKTH has funded four new Grid related projects: MEGA, Data Mining Grid, ADME/Tox-GRID és Service Infrastructure. All these projects put significant effort to enable the use of Grid in business and industrial environments.

The Ministry of Information Technology (IHM) has created a programme for the long-term strategy of the Hungarian e-society. This programme, called as the Hungarian Information Society Strategy (http://www.ihm.gov.hu/data/42303/mits_2003_eng.pdf ), mentions Grid technology explicitly as a major pillar of the programme. IHM plays an ever increasing role in funding Grid activities since 2003 where they started to fund the Hungarian Grid project with the aim of providing the necessary Grid research towards a Hungarian Grid infrastructure. Recently they took over the funding and supervision role of the ClusterGrid initiative. Members of the ministry are expressed their willingness to further support the creation of national Grid vision.

Research initiatives and approaches

There is one Grid infrastructure-oriented national Grid initiative in order to provide a nation-wide Grid infrastructure for the Hungarian higher educational institutions. This initiative was launched by the Ministry of Education (OM) in 2002 and currently funded by IHM. The project is now called as the ClusterGrid project (http://www.clustergrid.niif.hu/ ). It aims to integrate the Intel processor based PC labs of the Hungarian higher educational institutions into a single, large, countrywide interconnected set of clusters. The PCs are provided by participating Hungarian institutes, such as universities, polytechnics or public libraries. The central infrastructure and the coordination are provided by NIIF/HUNGARNET. All the contributors use their PCs for their own purposes (such as educational or office-like purposes) during the official working hours, and offer their infrastructure for high-throughput computation whenever they do not use them, i.e. during the nights and the unoccupied week-ends. The combined use of "day-shift" (i.e. individual mode) and "night-shift" (i.e. grid mode) enables to utilize CPU cycles (which would have been lost anyway) to provide firm computational infrastructure to the national research community. The applied technologies are based on Condor and SGE for task distribution and VPN for security. Currently more than 1400 PCs of 29 clusters are connected from 20 higher educational institutions.

As mentioned before MGKK plays an important role in the coordination of Grid research in Hungary, members of MGKK try to strongly coordinate their R&D activities in order to establish working Grid infrastructures in the country. The relatively large number of Grid research projects that were funded in the framework of different IT-oriented R&D programmes such as the IKTA programme organized by the Ministry of Education between 2000 - 2003 and the GVOP programme organized by the recently established National Office for Research and Technology (NKTH) were strongly coordinated by MGKK.

Members of MGKK have been participating in nearly all the Hungarian Grid related projects and have been regularly submitting joint project proposals for various R&D programmes. As a result of these Grid projects four different kinds of Grid systems have been successfully developed and tested in Hungary:

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  Hungarian ClusterGrid
  
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  HunGrid
  
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  JGrid
  
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  SZTAKI Desktop Grid
  

The goals and achievements of the Hungarian ClusterGrid have been described above. HunGrid is the Hungarian VO of the EGEE Grid with some extensions developed as part of the Hungarian Grid research efforts. HunGrid was created in the framework of the Hungarian Grid project funded by IHM and has got about 500 machines from 5 sites and two other sites have already decided to join with another 150 machines. Meanwhile ClusterGrid is a two-shift Grid and has been running since 2003 as an ever increasing production Grid, HunGrid has been providing a 7/24 service since March 2005. JGrid is a 3rd generation service-oriented Grid system developed on top of Jini and was successfully tested by three sites in 2004. Based on the results of the JGrid project (funded by OM) a new service-oriented Grid research project was launched in 2005 with the goal of creating a business-oriented Grid system usable by companies. SZTAKI Desktop Grid developed in the framework of the Hungarian Grid project funded by IHM is a newly created Grid service that can be installed in any universities and research institutes to exploit their PC cycles at any time of the day. The SZTAKI Desktop Grid approach generalizes the Desktop Grid ideas and makes them more scalable and Grid-like than their original versions.

In order to establish these Grid systems a large number of Grid research projects was necessary and these activities led to the creation of significant Grid expertise in the country. The Grid research projects are listed in the “Annex: Projects”. Example research results achieved in various projects include:

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  Tools and portals for accessing grid resources and services – SuperGrid, SuperCluster Grid, JGrid, Chemistry Grid, EU SEE-GRID
  
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  Resource Management and brokering – ClusterGrid, SuperCluster Grid
  
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  Monitoring of Grid operations and resource usage – ClusterGrid, DemoGrid, EU GridLab, EU DataGrid
  
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  Mobile user support – JGrid, Service Infrastructure
  
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  Grid Authorization System – ClusterGrid, HunGrid
  
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  Grid accounting – SuperGrid, SuperCluster Grid
  
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  Gridifying existing applications – DemoGrid, SuperCluster Grid, Chemistry Grid, Data Mining Grid, ADME/Tox-GRID Grid