GridCoord d 1

Research lines and approaches to past and current initiatives

Grid.it: national project on Grid research (MIUR-FIRB)

From the research initiatives mentioned above, supported by CNR, ASI and MIUR, a large and very significant national project originated, called Grid.it. It can also be considered as the initiative that co-ordinates and tries to unify the various national efforts in Grid research (see section Research projects) and in Grid infrastructures (see section INFN projects on Grid infrastructures).

Grid.it (Enabling Platforms for High-performance Computational Grids Oriented to Scalable Virtual Organizations) is a FIRB Strategic Project in the area of Enabling Technologies for Information Society, co-ordinated by the National Research Council, with a grant of 8,1 M€ for three years (November 2002 – November 2005) from the Italian Ministry for Education and Research (the total is cost 11 M€). The project (www.grid.it), having a strong interdisciplinary character, is aimed at defining, implementing and applying innovative solutions for network computing enabling platforms, oriented towards scalable Virtual Organizations and based on the Grid Computing paradigm. The research topics of Grid.it span from high performance photonic networks, innovative middleware services, high-performance programming environments to application testbeds.

Moreover, Grid.it acted as the coordination initiative of the two tracks described above: on Grid research in Computer Science and Technology and on advanced Grid infrastructures. CNR, CNIT and ASI work on tools for next generation Grids and applications, while INFN carries out the work to accomplish a Grid Production Infrastructure that will be applied in Bioinformatics, Astronomy and Geophysics, and that, in the next future, will be integrated with the above-mentioned tools for next generation Grids.

Ahead of the distributed platform based on a distributed infrastructure aspect, in Grid.it a special emphasis is placed on the high performance requirement of the applications developed on Grids. A Grid-aware version of the ASSIST programming environment is designed and experimented in Grid.it, supporting adaptivity and heterogeneity in large-scale dynamic platforms. It is applied and demonstrated in large-scale high-performance codes for Earth Observation (SAR, Interferometry, Climatology), Image Processing, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Use Profiling, Data Mining, Search Engines, Crawling.

High-speed networks needed to support enabling Grid platforms for scalable VOs is an internationally recognized “hot” topic. Within this research activity an important role is played by experiments on very high bandwidth networks based on photonic technology, to connect Grid platforms with high performance sites.

Beyond the aspects concerning programming environments and resource management, the software technology studied in Grid.it includes some fundamental aspects related to Middleware:

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  Security;
  
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  Data intensive services;
  
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  Knowledge discovery services;
  
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  Grid portals;
  
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  Scientific libraries.
  

Grid.it includes the development of some demonstrators selected within applicative fields that are of maximum interest, not only for their scientific value, but also as testbeds for high performance Grid platforms:

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  Earth observation
  
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  Geophysics
  
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  Astronomy
  
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  Biology
  
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  Computational chemistry
  

In order to be able to carry out and experiment the ideas and the results of the project, several Grid infrastructures (two by CNR, one by INFN, one by ASI) are implemented on a national scale, based on the GARR network. This project result provides the community with national Grid resources to be used in different computational science research sectors, and also for commerce, industrial and social service applications.

Six High Qualification Centres (Research Units) participate in the project:

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  ISTI-CNR (Domenico Laforenza)
  
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  ISTM-CNR (Marzio Rosi)
  
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  ICAR-CNR (Almerico Murli)
  
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  INFN (Mirco Mazzucato)
  
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  CNIT (Giancarlo Prati)
  
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  ASI (Giovanni Milillo)
  

The six Research Units co-ordinate the activity of large number of University departments (Pisa, Cosenza, Padova, Perugia, Rome Tor Vergata, Rome La Sapienza, Bologna, Naples, Genova, Milano Bicocca, Turin, Venezia, Trieste, Bari, Lecce) is in this field.

INFN projects on Grid infrastructures

The Grid components supported and released by INFN Grid include:

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  Workload Management Service for distributed scheduling and resource management in a Grid environment;
  
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  Data Management Services;
  
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  Portals and Grid User Interface;
  
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  Virtual Organization oriented Authentication/Authorization Service;
  
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  General Grid Monitoring Service;
  
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  Economy based Grid Accounting Service;
  
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  Virtual Organization oriented Policy enforcing framework;
  
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  Virtual Organization oriented User Support systems.
  

All components are supported and will evolve towards an Open Grid Service Architecture adhering to Web and “Grid Services” standards and are made available under a general Open Source Licence.

A large e-Infrastructure (Grid over the GARR Research Network) is now in production in Italy.

Resources are provided by INFN and other major Italian Research Institutions, like ENEA, INAF, INGV and some Computing Centres like those of the S-PACI Consortium.

A Grid Operation Service, located in INFN CNAF (Bologna), supports the operation of several Science applications and the operation of the Italian infrastructure also in the context of the new European Infrastructure project EGEE.

Research projects with a significant industrial impact

In the past years, R&D activities have produced a large variety of middleware components, most of them available under an Open Source licence. These allow to certify and authorize users, to elaborate digital distributed data, to handle large simulation processes and to share, in a transparent way, distributed computational resources. Many of these services, thanks to their extensive exploitation in several large research e-Infrastructures, Datagrid, LHC Computing Grid, EGEE, begin to have the quality in terms of functionality, robustness and reliability to provide effective solutions for other domains of the society.

Two industrial projects apply and customize the software development tools of Grid.it, in particular the ASSIST programming environment and the Knowledge Discovery Services:

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  The Saib Project, led by Athos Origin, with the participation of University of Pisa and Polytechnic of Turin. Its goal is the realization of a software infrastructure for multi-channel, distributed financial applications, able to co-ordinate legacy software of banks and finance institutions and to exploit knowledge in user profiling.
  
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  The Sfida project on e-business, led by TXT e-solutions and co-ordinated by Marco Vanneschi, with partners from Universities (Pisa, Milano Bicocca, Luiss), CNR (ICAR, ITIA), Hewlett-Packard and some SMEs. Its goal is the realization of an advanced Grid platform, based on the results and tools of Grid.it, for Supply Chain Management, and in particular for Supply Chains constituted by SMEs, with a significant set of demonstrators in Retail Planning, Car Design Planning, Textile Planning, Distribution Logistics, Food Distributions.
  

Other industrial activities on the application of Grid.it tools are starting, promoted by ASI, in the context of Environment, Civil Protection and Disaster Prevention.