GridCoord DoW

Links to International and EU activities

The major participations in FP5 include:

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  European Data Grid (EDG)
  
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  DataTAG
  
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  Cross Grid
  
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  e-Learning
  

Among the Grid related FP6 funded projects, the largest participation is in EGEE, coordinated by CERN, which aim at the development of an e-Infrastructure for Science in Europe, and involve 26 countries, 70 European Institutions and 3 US ones.

In FP6 Italy has a major role in DEISA, CoreGrid and e-Legi and coordinates several new projects such as:

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  Diligent (6M€) coordinated by ISTI-CNR ,
  
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  Gridcc (4 M€) coordinated by INFNa
  
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  GridCoord co-ordinated by the University of Pisa
  

Italy is actively taking part to the activities of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (eIRG) together with the other members appointed by the EU Science Ministers. Italy been a promoter of the Global Grid Forum hosting in Rome one of the first editions and is contributing to several working groups.

At international level a joint collaboration with Globus and Condor, lasting since 1999, has brought, between other achievements, to the development of the Global Laboratory Universal Environment (GLUE) schema, the current GGF “standard” to describe Computing and Storage Resources and is now continuing to reach a complete specification of an interface to Computing Resources and in the domain of the information systems.

A joined effort with DataTAG and the US project iVDGL has led to the development of an interoperable test-bed between the EDG and the US grids which was demonstrated at SC2002 and IST2002. Within the EGRID project Italy is collaborating with the University of Caltech to develop specific grid tool for finance.

The Netherlands

Key projects

Current initiatives emphasise the role of networking research and infrastructure, Grid infrastructure and e-Science.

Virtual Laboratory for e-Science

The VL-e project has as its mission to boost e-Science by the investigation of methodologies and the creation of an e-Science environment. The philosophy is to develop e-Science generic methodology along the total technology chain where the applications are the drivers for the research. The strategy is to carry out concerted research along the complete e-Science technology chain, ranging from applications to networking, focused on new methodologies and reusable components. The project makes a distinction between a rapid-prototyping environment where new research ideas can be quickly evaluated and a proof-of-concept environment where application cases can be developed and that should be the basis for a later further roll out of Grid technology.

In addition the Dutch bioinformatics initiative BioRange closely collaborates with VL-e in the research as well as proof of concept for bioinformatics tool boxes. The Grid research being undertaken comprises parallelization of algorithms, management of data, and information (based on ontologies), text and data mining, dynamic workflow automation interactive computational steering, problem solving environments, high-performance and high-throughput computing, among others.

VL-e builds on the success of the ICES/KIS II project Virtual Laboratory Amsterdam which was carried out during the period 1999–2002. The aims of theVL-e project are:

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  Creating scientific prototypes of application-specific e-Science environments;
  
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  Developing a methodology for reusable ICT components;
  
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  Validating ICT methodologies and technologies;
  
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  Building up and transferring knowledge on effectively realising application-specific e-Science environments.
  

The total budget is 55.6 M€ of which 20 M€ is provided by Bsik. The consortium is made up of the following partners:

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  Science and Technology Centre Watergraafsmeer (WTCW);
  
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  University of Amsterdam (UvA) is represented by several of its institutes:
  

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  Computer Architecture and Parallel Systems Group
  
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  Advanced Internet Research Group
  
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  Computational Science Group
  
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  Institute for Logic, Language and Computation
  
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  Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences
  
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  Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics
  

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  Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) is represented by two of its institutes:
  

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  National Institute for Nuclear Physics and High-energy Physics (NIKHEF) and
  
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  FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF);
  

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  Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI);
  
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  SARA Computing and Network Services;
  
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  Academic Medical Centre Amsterdam (AMC);
  
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  Free University Amsterdam (VU);
  
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  Free University Medical Centre (VUmc);
  
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  Delft University of Technology (TUD);
  
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  Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC);
  
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  Organisation for Applied Research in the Natural Sciences (TNO);
  
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  Wageningen Centre for Food Sciences (WCFS);
  
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  Unilever Netherlands;
  
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  Institute for Agrotechnological Research (ATO);
  
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  Friesland Coberco Dairy Foods (FCDF);
  
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  IBM Netherlands;
  
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  Logica CMG Netherlands;
  
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  Philips Electronics Netherlands;
  
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  FEI Electron Optics.
  

GigaPort Next Generation

GigaPort is a consortium of over 50 members: universities, academic hospitals, businesses and research facilities. It conducts research into new generation networks and their implementation in the research community. The current GigaPort network is among the best research networks in the world. GigaPort’s goal is to make available a state of the art test network to facilitate the development of e-Science and e-Business. GigaPort’s aim is to carry out “research on networks” while providing “networks for research”. Research subjects on networking include optical networking, high performance routing and switching, management and monitoring, and grids. Conversely the project provides a national and international networking infrastructure for the Dutch scientific community in general and the grid community in particular, allowing them a competitive advantage in their research. In anticipation of the rapid convergence of metacomputing, peer-to-peer computing and web services into a common grid infrastructure, GigaPort focuses its research and development work.

LOFAR

The LOFAR project aims at the development of a new generation, large-scale, wide-area array of sensors for radio astronomy with applications not only in astrophysics and space physics, but also in geophysics, water management and agriculture. LOFAR is the largest radio telescope in the world, consisting of 25000 small antennas placed across a large area of the northeast of the Netherlands and part of Germany. Such a large sensor networking project makes great demands on networking, data storage, coupling of distributed computing power for pattern matching, data mining, and visualisation of complex multidimensional data sets. LOFAR will have to develop a considerable Grid infrastructure for that purpose. Currently LOFAR is running at a total of around 22 terabits per second, a figure which is anticipated to rise to about 50 Terabits per second by 2010. Much of LOFAR’s data processing will be done by the recently unveiled Stella supercomputer in Groningen a 12,000 processor system with a processing power of some 27 Teraflops.

LOFAR is governed by the astronomy institute ASTRON of NWO as well as by various application collaborations at Dutch universities.

The ASCI DAS Distributed Supercomputer

The Distributed ASCI Supercomputer 2, DAS-2 is a wide-area distributed computer of 200 Dual Pentium-III nodes. The machine is built out of clusters of workstations, which are interconnected by Surfnet, the Dutch university Internet backbone for wide-area communication, with Myrinet used for local communication. The clusters are located at five Dutch Universities. The Grid is dedicated to research programs in the field of large-scale distributed systems and high-performance visualisation as well as medical and scientific simulations. Recently the NWO has granted funding for a successor, to be known as the DAS3.