GridCoord d 1

Funding Structure and Co-ordination

Recently a new National Innovation System of the Hungarian Government has been established as follows.

In order to speed up economic growth in Hungary, the government is committed to the development and operation of a new, efficient innovation system. This goal can be realised if research and development is driven by the present and future needs of the economy.

To reach this goal, the institutional and legal frameworks have been revised. Consequently, the Science and Technology Policy Board (TTPK) has been established chaired by the Prime Minister. The Vice Presidents of TTPK are the Minister of Education and the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The members are the ministers concerned and the invited member is the President of the National Office for Research and Technology. As the advisory body of TTPK, the Science and Technology Advisory Committee (TTTT) has been set up of distinguished scientists and R&D experts.

Further on, a new government office, the National Office for Research and Technology (NKTH) has been established supervised by the Minister of Education. NKTH is responsible for implementing the government’s science and technology policy. Its duties are to provide a new framework for the national innovation system and to promote research and development that will boost Hungarian economy.

To create a predictable environment for the exploitation of R&D results, the Research and Technology Innovation Fund has been established. The Fund is managed by NKTH. Apart from the micro- and small enterprises, every enterprise is obliged to pay at least 0.25% of its turnover into the Fund. The Hungarian government contributes to the Fund with an equivalent amount. The goal of NKTH is to provide sufficient funding for innovation programs that aim to create innovative services and products. These programs will be simple, transparent and evaluated by independent experts. Representatives of the academic and industrial spheres will submit proposals together.

Under the supervision of NKTH, the Agency for Research Fund Management and Research Exploitation (KPI) is responsible for managing innovation programs. The Research and Technology Innovation Council (KTIT) helps NKTH in developing its innovation strategy (incl. the strategy of using the Fund). Members of the KTIT delegated by ministries responsible for innovation form the minority, while the majority is formed by representatives of the scientific community and industry.

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) is an autonomous public body. Its task is to promote science. In order to achieve this goal, it maintains a special academic research network. The HAS and its institutes are financed by state budget.

The National Innovation System of the Hungarian Government is shown in the figure below.

Figure 1: The National Innovation System of the Hungarian Government

Links to International and EU activities

The Hungarian Grid projects have been always progressing in close relationship with international and EU projects, and Hungarian researchers and institutes have been involved in many EU Grid projects. The most significant EU collaboration is performed in the framework of the EGEE project in which all the members of MGKK are partners.

Within the framework of the VISSZKI project and the SuperGrid project SZTAKI was in a strong collaboration with the Condor group. As a result of the collaboration we have created a new version of Condor PVM Universe. The original Condor PVM Universe required that only one PVM process could be installed on every Condor PVM resource. The new version is as generic as PVM, i.e., it enables the creation of as many PVM processes as the user wants on every Condor PVM resource.

Another important extension of Condor is related with check-pointing and migration. Condor originally supported only the check-pointing and migration of sequential jobs. As a result of the collaboration P-GRADE and Condor was integrated and in the integrated system any P-GRADE generated PVM program can be check-pointed and the processes of the PVM program or the whole application can be migrated between Condor Grid resources. This new version of Condor was successfully applied in the Hungarian SuperGrid project and demonstrated at several international conferences.

The DemoGrid project was strongly collaborating with EDG and the LHC Grid project of CERN. As a result several Hungarians have been working in CERN on the data management service of EDG, LCG-2 and G-lite Grid middlewares. Hungarians were also involved in the development of the EDG security system.

The Hungarian Grid and SuperGrid projects strongly collaborated with the GridLab project. The GridSphere Grid portal framework was applied in the Hungarian Grid portals and particularly in the P-GRADE portal. The chief-architect of GridSphere, Jason Novotny, has visited SZTAKI for two months in order to strengthen the collaboration. The Mercury Grid monitor developed in the GridLab project is intensively used in the Hungarian Grid projects and particularly it is connected with P-GRADE and the P-GRADE portal.

The Hungarian Chemistry Grid project collaborates with the SIMBEX Chemistry D23 COST project. Italian researchers from Peruggia visited SZTAKI several times for weeks in order to study P-GRADE and the P-GRADE portal.

The Hungarian Grid project strongly collaborates with EGEE. The HunGrid Grid infrastructure developed in the framework of the Hungarian Grid project is based on the EGEE Grid software. Staff members at NIIF work on solving interoperability between the EGEE Grid and the Hungarian ClusterGrid. There is an extremely good working relationship with the European SEEGRID project where SZTAKI leads the work of the middleware workpackage with the help of NIIFI.

The JGrid project has many connections with the international Jini community and with Sun Microsystems.

The Hungarian Grid project strongly collaborates with some UK projects. SZTAKI is an associated partner of the UK e-science OGSA Test-bed project and in the framework of that project the P-GRADE portal developed in the Hungarian Grid project and the GEMLCA Grid legacy code architecture developed in the UK e-science OGSA Test-bed project were successfully integrated and demonstrated at SC04. This collaboration is successfully carried on in the framework of the CoreGrid project. SZTAKI and University of Reading jointly produce the collaborative version of the P-GRADE portal.

Hungarian researchers are actively involved in the CoreGrid project, too with the goal that research results of CoreGrid will be integrated into the Hungarian Grid infrastructure.