GridCoord d 1

Annex: Projects

Project name	Coordinating institution	URL	Timing
PROGRESS	PSNC	http://progress.psnc.pl	2002-2003
Clusterix	Technical University of Czestochowa	http://clusterix.pcz.pl	2004-2006
LDAP	University of Torun	http://ldap.uni.torun.pl	2002-2003
SGI Grid	Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet Cracow	http://www.wcss.wroc.pl/pb/sgigrid/	2003-2005
iTVP (Interactive Polish Television)	Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet Cracow	http://www.itvp.pl/	2004-2006
VLAB	PSNC	http://vlab.psnc.pl/	2004-2005

Grid Strategy

As mentioned before, PIONIER (2001-2005) is the main Grid programme in Poland and it defines the Grid strategy for Poland. One of the key strategic issues for Polish research in Grids is its participation in the EGEE/EGEE II projects. For this purpose the Polish Grid Consortium was formed in 2002 to represent Polish physics groups in the EGEE projects. The Consortium is supported by the Ministry of Science and Education.

The strategy will be further defined in PIONIER II programme (2006-2010).

Annex H - Spain

Short History

The first GRID-related projects funded by Spanish bodies were launched in the year 2000, focusing on Grid computing, Grid and collaborative learning, and High Energy physics, the last one being part of the development of the DataGRID infrastructure. In the year 2002, thematic networks and working groups were initiated, and the first public demo of a Spanish Grid was made in June 2004.

The recently established 2004-2007 programme¹ contains a separate section on the e-Science strategic action, where its very relevant role in future research is recognised. However, this section does not state final aims, and it recognises itself as establishing an interim action addressing the setup of a more ambitious research programme. The short-term objectives to be addressed are:

• 
  To single out common problems in different areas in order to propose similar solutions.
  
• 
  To foster interaction and cross-fertilization among groups of scientists which need support to develop and use e-Science applications and groups of computer science and information technology experts.
  
• 
  To support interoperation, integration, and exchange of expertise within these research and development groups. In particular, there will be specific actions to improve existing infrastructure with the goal of making them available to a larger community of researchers and research groups. Hiring new staff to maintain that infrastructure and to develop the required applications would also fall under the umbrella of these actions, as well as funding the necessary coordination measures.
  

While a certain lag with respect to other European countries is acknowledged, Spanish funding bodies recognize that Grid computing can be important for the future development of several scientific and technical areas. There is, therefore, a commitment to give priority to Grid-related research at national and regional level by empowering this e-Science initiative. A committee to study the impact of e-Science, in which Grid technologies are seen as a core part, was set up and endowed with the task of designing a roadmap thereof. This task has been recently finished and its results presented to the scientific community.

Past and Current Initiatives

As initiatives related to e-Science and Grid technology have only recently been formally established in Spain, few projects have been launched directly under these action lines. Special mention should be made to the Thematic Network for Middleware Activities, which is funded by the Ministry of Education and Science (MEC), which started in 2002 and which clusters twenty research groups and institutions. Its goal is to establish common objectives and coordination activities and hold periodic workshops in order to determine the actions and paths to improve the development of Grid (focusing on middleware) while, at the same time, preventing wasting resources and reducing work duplication in different research groups. This network was developed under the umbrella and partial funding of a Spanish Specific Support Action.

Complementarily to this network, the IRISGrid initiative aims at providing interested parties with best practice advices on the use of Internet resources and on security issues (i.e., in general, building a good infrastructure to deploy Grid-based applications) and also at achieving a higher scientific and technological coordination. IRISGrid was born within RedIRIS, the Spanish national organization which manages the academic Internet network. IRISGrid is a meeting point of many institutions (listed below) and it also maintains contacts with the Thematic Network for Middleware in order. The research groups and institutions which are actively involved in IRISGrid are listed in the Table 2 in the Annex.

The current national research plan (NRP), launched in 2004, lists a few subprogrammes which mention explicitly the application of and research on Grid technologies. These subprograms highlight the following areas:

• 
  Application of e-Science and Grid technologies to medical imaging and simulation, in order to ease the access to big repositories of structured data.
  
• 
  Development of algorithms to compress and transmit data from astrophysics experiments, and to perform numerical processing. Clustering with thematic networks, such as IRISGrid, is identified as one of the main means to achieve this goal.
  
• 
  Participation in the Grid project for the Large Hadron Collider.
  
• 
  Grid computing for agent-based systems.
  
• 
  Network computing with a special emphasis on Grid technologies.