GridCoord d 1

Future Initiatives

In order to explore the needs of Grid funding, and to lay out a blueprint for the future development of Grid research in Spain, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology² (FECYT) set up a board (whose members are detailed below) to explore the situation of Grid-based research (and, more generally, of e-Science) in Spain.

As a result, the recently presented White Book on e-Science in Spain details a series of areas in which Grid computing can be of invaluable help, supporting this list with detailed reasons for their selection.

The white book lists a series of already existing resources which should be shared among researchers in order to increase productivity, and makes the point that a well-developed Grid infrastructure is key to take advantage of these resources in a transparent, homogeneous manner. It also highlights that the driving force of such a joint effort comes from applications, whose users will greatly benefit from the added computing power and transparent access. The fields which are recognized as (non exclusively) highly benefiting from new computing technologies, and those where improvement will help to overcome existing technological gaps are:

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  Astronomy and space research.
  
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  Biomedicine and health sciences.
  
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  Technology of new materials.
  
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  Earth sciences.
  
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  Physics.
  
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  Engineering.
  
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  Chemistry.
  
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  Information Society technologies.
  

It is proposed that special actions be taken to incorporate specific initiatives to fund projects using Grid technologies to deal with computationally hard problems in the aforementioned fields. This should presumably be done in addition to the already existing initiatives. It is to be expected that, as the wide interest of Grid computing be officially acknowledged in the Spanish NRP, the recommendations of this white book will be taken into account when new specific project calls are issued.

The board which took part in the creation of the white paper, and whose members can be very adequately described as driving forces of the research, development, and use of Grids in Spain, was composed by Mateo Valero (Technical University of Catalonia), José Manuel Báez (FECYT), Miquel Huguet (Catalonian Supercomputing Center), Rafael García Tamarit (FECYT), Luis Balairón (National Meteorology Institute), Víctor Castelo (Spanish Council of Scientific Research - CSIC), Manuel Delfino (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Javier García Tobio (Galician Supercomputing Center), Javier Jiménez Sendén (Technical University of Madrid), Jesús Marco (CSIC and University of Cantabria)³, Fernando Martín Sánchez (Health Institute Carlos III), Daniel Ponz (European Space Agency), Lluis Anglada (Catalonian University Library Consortium), Juan José Moreno (Technical University of Madrid)⁴, Santiago Olivella (CSIC), and Pablo Ordejon (CSIC).

Funding Structure and Co-ordination

Spanish-funded research is instrumented around the National Research Plan (NRP), whose objective is to foster research in all areas of knowledge, with special attention to those deemed to bring more social advantages. This means that NRP also provides budget to non-technical research projects, such as linguistics, social research, history, etc. However, research related to the development of information society and the application of information technologies to different research areas are identified as key goals.

Figure 1: Structure of Funding Bodies and National Research Plan in Spain

Unlike in other countries, most Spanish public funds for research in Computer Science and related areas are not made available through councils or research agencies, but directly by the Ministries (with the exception of some of the projects under the ministry of Industry, which are released through a special agency called CDTI, which is entitled to grant soft loans to private companies in order to start R+D projects). Coordination between all ministries with initiatives in R+D is performed by the Commission for the Science and Technology (CICYT), which takes care of planning and monitoring the National Research Plan. This intermediate commission, under the direct supervision of the Prime Minister, acts as communication channel between ministries to plan joint activities (such as research lines with similar aims), and to split the available overall budget for research between the different research lines contained in the NRP. The CICYT has a consulting committee (CAICYT) which elaborates reports for the CICYT or for the R+D sections of the governments of the Autonomous Regions.

Funding for research is mainly provided by the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Industry (see Figure 1). Within them, most research related to Grid activities are managed by the State Secretariat for Scientific and Technological Policies (at the MEC) and the State Secretariat for the Development of the Information Society (at the MIN). These secretariats handle research lines in other fields as well. Research on Grid technologies and on applications thereof to other fields are listed as targets in the current NRP, spanning from 2004 to 2007. A listing of Grid projects launched in 2003 and 2004 under the NRP and projects funded by other bodies (as, e.g., autonomous region funds or private funds from Universities) is available in the Annex at the end of this section (Table 1). In the MEC, the management of academic research projects in all areas is under the supervision of the Deputy Director for Research Projects, José Luis Martínez⁵. The coordination of the research programmes within the area of Information Technologies is done by José María Troya, with Sascha Ossowski as deputy coordinator. In the same Ministry, the Office for Technological Policies is in charge of projects more geared towards industry and applications, under the direction of Carlos Alejaldre Losilla.

The Ministry of Industry gives grants for non-academic research projects. Those related to Computer Science fall within the so-called PROFIT programme, which is jointly managed by the MIN and the MEC, and coordinated by the CICYT. In the MIN, these projects are under the umbrella of the Office for the Development of the Information Society, which is headed by José Luis Jarque de la Gándara, with the assistance of Antonio Rodríguez Agea. While Grid projects are not a main research line of the PROFIT programme, some of its targeted areas can certainly benefit from Grid-based technologies.

In addition to the central government, the seventeen autonomous regions Spain is divided into can set up their own research, innovation, and funding plans, using part of the budget given back to the regions by the central government. While similar in spirit, the scope and focus of these research and innovation plans might, very understandably, differ among regions to account for particular situations. Therefore, the degree of activity and commitment is different in each region, depending of the topics which are perceived as more important for their development. Similarly, the internal structure of each of the R+D sections of each region, and whether it is a council, a part of a more academic- or more industry-oriented section is different for each case. This structure, which is devised to be decentralized right from the beginning, makes it difficult to have a comprehensive catalogue of projects and funding in Spain as a whole.