GridCoord d 1

Annex I - Sweden

Short history

In Sweden Grid systems related research started in the 1990s, emphasis was on co-ordinated use of high performance computing systems and clusters. One of the early sites was PDC at KTH where their annual conference of 1999 had the title “Simulation and Visualization on the Grid”, proceedings published by Springer Verlag. The same year a proposal was drawn up for the creation of a Swedish HPC-metacenter. In the beginning of 2002 the Swedish Research Council decided to establish such a metacenter, SNIC, Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing.

The major national Grid computing initiative is SweGrid, which is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) and the KA Wallenberg Foundation. The proposal was granted in 2002 and the installations of the six Gridnodes started in 2003. SNIC is coordinator of SweGrid operation.

Grid awareness has been built not only in academia but also to some extent in industry. Significant Grid research and development has been carried out in many locations by many researchers.

Formal education programmes have started. National Graduate School in Scientific Computing (NGSSC) has enrolled 85 PhD students since start in 1996. In August 2003 the first Grid Computing course was held by KTH collaborating with Umeå and Uppsala universities.

Research lines and approaches – past and current

There is a strong Grid research community in Sweden, but there is so far no comprehensive national funding programme specifically for Grid, and the attitudes of the various funding bodies tend to be optimistic but cautious and the responsibility is delegated to existing organizations with funding in the HPC and general computing area.

Forming a main research line, several research projects in Sweden are dedicated to make Grid technology more mature and user friendly. Examples include a Grid Resource Brokering tool and a project to combine the power of the Grid with a modern high-level modelling language by developing a framework for simulation on computational grids, GridModelica.

Grid security and trust is another research line.

Already since 2001, Grid research activities are funded by VINNOVA in the context of a RTD programme in Network based software technologies. VINNOVA has goals of industrial applications and growth and thus is funding projects with industrial participation and some focus on Grid applications for industry.

An example project of significance is LOIS – the LOFAR Outrigger In Scandinavia. The LOIS project is e-Science in space physics with Växjö as hub and led by professor Bo Thidé, but it is also an initiative with several important Grid aspects, from stream architecture to data base technology to 10 Gb/s network connections.

NorduGrid is a Nordic Grid Research and Development collaboration initiated in 2001, aiming at development, maintenance and support of the ARC (Advance Resource Connector) grid middleware.

A proposal for a Nordic Data Grid Facility has also been submitted.

Funding Structure and Co-ordination

In Sweden there is no comprehensive Grid computing funding strategy at this time.

The various initiatives have been devised and led by people in Sweden having good understanding of the potential mainly in academia but also in industry.

SweGrid is a computational grid consisting of 600 computers distributed over six sites throughout Sweden:

• 
  Lunarc, Lund
  
• 
  UNICC, Göteborg
  
• 
  NSC, Linköping
  
• 
  PDC, Stockholm
  
• 
  Uppmax, Uppsala
  
• 
  HPC2N, Umeå
  

The hardware in the SweGrid project is financed by a donation from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation. Operational costs and personnel for support and maintenance are funded by the SNIC Meta Center – Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing which is organized under the Swedish Research Council. SNIC is led by professor Anders Ynnerman, Linköping, who has been a key person in the field for many years (he is member of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group).

The SweGrid project has defined its goals to be to stimulate Grid development and to serve as a production test bed. The focus is on e-Science, but there is also awareness of the industrial potential.

The major policy framework is in SNIC, the governing body for SweGrid. This means there is a natural, almost seamless relation between High Performance Computing funding and Grid computing funding.

A third of the SweGrid capacity is reserved for high energy physics computation, with the remaining capacity to be granted on a peer-review basis to researchers in different disciplines by the Swedish National Allocations Committee (SNAC).

The SNIC strategy is to enable a smooth transition to Grid computing on a national scale and also internationally. The SweGrid test bed and its role for e-Science is a significant step in the implementation of this strategy. SNIC has the pronounced vision of having all its resources available in a Swedish Grid infrastructure.

SNIC has initiated work on a strategy document describing the Swedish HPC landscape on a five-year time scale. The strategy document will contain a roadmap for the transition to a Grid based infrastructure.

A Committee for Research Infrastructures has been established in the Swedish Research Council in 2005. It includes a subgroup dealing with Infrastructure for e-Science.

Annex: Projects

Project name	Coordinating institution	URL
Generic Grid computing research	Umeå university	http://snic.vr.se/snic_portals.htm
Grid security research	KTH	http://snic.vr.se/snic_rnd_security.htm
GES3 Grid enabled scalable self-organizing services	SICS/KTH	http://www.sics.se/dsl/ges3/
GRIDModelica	Linköping university	http://www.ida.liu.se/labs/pelab/modelica/GridModelica.html
Adaptive GRID-service architecture	Växjö university	http://www.msi.vxu.se/~wlo/grid
GRID data base handling	Uppsala university	http://user.it.uu.se/~milena/
Parallel Object Query System for Expensive Computations	Uppsala university	http://snic.vr.se/snic_rnd_database.htm
GCPORTAL	gridCore AB