GridCoord d 1

Annex: current projects

Project name	Description	Funding	Authority	Principal Participants
Virtual Laboratory for e-Science	Boosting e-Science by the investigation of methodologies and the creation of an e-Science environment	20M€	Bsik	WTCW Amsterdam, UvA, SARA, VU, FOM
GigaPort	Carrying out research on networks while providing networks for research.	40M€	Bsik	Over 50 universities, academic hospitals, businesses and research facilities
LOFAR	Developing a new generation, large-scale, wide-area array of sensors for radio astronomy with additional applications in geophysics, water management and agriculture.	52M€	Bsik	NWO ASTRON

Annex G - Poland

Short history

The State Committee for Scientific Research funded grid research and development. The PIONIER initiative is the main instrument for implementing Grids in Poland. The full name of the initiative is “PIONIER – Polish Optical Internet, Advanced Applications, Services and Technologies for Information Society”.

The concept of the PIONIER programme envisages the attainment of three basic objectives:

• 
  Develop an information sciences infrastructure in Poland up to the level, which facilitates conducting research in the area of challenges of contemporary science, technology, services and applications.
  
• 
  Produce and test pilot services and applications for the information society, which form the basis for implementations in sciences, education, administration and economy.
  
• 
  Let Poland compete in the area of software development for new applications.
  

The developed, produced and implemented applications, services and technologies will be implemented in all areas of life. Therefore, during accomplishment of the programme, costs of implementations will be incurred by the involved entities (ministries, government, telecommunication operators, firms producing hardware and software vendors as well as other entrepreneurs).

The accomplishment of the programme will lead to the achievement of important objectives. The most important ones include:

• 
  Producing concepts of organization-technical strategies for development of information society by way of ensuring wide access to the Internet and its services for education sector;
  
• 
  Creating a domestic national infrastructure of a broadband government and self-government administration network;
  
• 
  Promoting new models of operation and cooperation between government, self-government and economic institutions in a modern information society through advanced services and applications;
  
• 
  Showing a development path for the Polish IT business with regard to the programme products and commercial services for information society;
  
• 
  Providing scientific environment with access to advanced network infrastructure and specialized infrastructure (including computers with large computational power HPC systems);
  
• 
  Enabling Polish teams participating in EU Framework programmes and other international programmes;
  
• 
  Maintaining the level of technical and scientific IT infrastructure development at the level of European Union countries.
  

Consortia composed of scientific institutions, economic entities, government and self-government administration bodies – participating in the financing of the implementation - will track the fulfilment of the programmes objectives.

The State Committee of Scientific Research Committee (KBN) subsidized the achievement of the programme objectives, using the existing principles and methods of funds allocation:

• 
  Applications (apart from applications in the area of computational sciences) will be subsidized in the form of specific projects or specific requested projects;
  
• 
  Applications in the area of computational sciences) will be subsidized in the form of proprietary research projects or research projects requested by KBN;
  
• 
  Network services can be subsidized in the form of specific projects or specific requested projects;
  
• 
  Network infrastructure and specialized infrastructure will be subsidized in form of specific projects, specific requested projects or investments made as joint ventures.
  
• 
  International connections with scientific research networks (with GÉANT and GÉANT2 network, i.e. to be used exclusively for scientific purposes) - in form subsidies for special projects or research equipment SPUB.
  

Research lines and approaches – past and current

There is a strong Grid community in Poland, working mainly in the following academic cities: Gdansk, Cracow, Poznan, Warsaw, Wrocław, Częstochowa. The main research lines and approaches can be listed here, but in general, Polish Grid research focuses in several areas of the Grid architecture. Thus, we have application support and portal development (mainly Poznan, Cracow and Warsaw), grid resource management (Poznan, Wroclaw), grid monitoring (Cracow, Poznan), grid security (Poznan), networking (Poznan), data management (Poznan, Cracow), grid mobile user support (Poznan, Cracow). Example solutions developed in various projects include:

• 
  Tools and portals for accessing grid resources and services – the PROGRESS project;
  
• 
  Resource Management (GRMS) – GridLab, Clusterix, SGIGrid;
  
• 
  Monitoring of Grid operations and resource usage – CrossGrid, Progress, Clusterix;
  
• 
  Mobile user support – CrossGrid and GridLab;
  
• 
  Intrusion detection system and Grid Authorization System – GridLab, Clusterix, PSNC own research;
  
• 
  Data management services – PROGRESS.
  

The most prominent Grid project spanning almost whole Poland is the Clusterix project (CLUSTERIX = National CLUSTER of LInuX Systems). This project aims at building a core infrastructure for clustering local PC clusters, allocated and distributed among universities. The implementation makes it possible to deploy a production-class Grid environment, which consists of local PC-clusters with 64- and 32-bit architectures, located in geographically distant independent centres. The overall performance of the current GRID installation is 4,4 Tflops with 800+ Intel Itanium2 processors. The management software (middleware) being developed will allow for dynamic changes in the hardware configuration. The software based on Open Source environments will allow for extending the existing functionality and creating new tools as necessary. The project is being implemented by 12 Polish supercomputing centres and universities (for more information see: http://clusterix.pcz.pl/) and is led by the University in Częstochowa.