GridCoord DoW

International Activities

In the next sections we will list the Spanish participation in Grid initiatives in EU V and VI framework programmes. We will detail, when possible, which tasks Spanish partners are involved in.

Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, EGEE (IST-2003-508833)

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE in Europe (EGEE) project began in May 2004 and brings together experts from over 27 countries with the common aim of building on recent advances in Grid technology and developing a service Grid infrastructure which is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day.

The project aims at providing researchers in academia and industry with access to large computing resources, independent of their geographic location. The EGEE project will also focus on attracting a wide range of new users to the Grid.

EGEE is constructed around 12 partner 'federations', comprising 70 partner institutions. These federations cover a wide range of both scientific and industrial applications. The project will primarily focus on three core areas:

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  Building a consistent, robust, and secure Grid network that will attract additional computing resources.
  
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  Continuously improving and maintaining the middleware in order to deliver a dependable service to users.
  
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  Attracting new users from industry and science and ensure they receive the high standard of training and support they need.
  

The Spanish partners are the Galician Supercomputing Centre (CESGA), Institute of High-Energy Physics (IFAE) and National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA, in task SA1), Scientific Research Council (CSIC, in tasks NA4, SA1, and NA5) and Technical University of Valencia (in task NA4).

SA1 (European Grid Support, Operation and Management) will create, operate, support, and manage a production quality European Grid infrastructure which will make computing, storage, instrumentation and informational resources existing in many Resource Centres across Europe accessible to user communities and virtual organisations according to agreed access management policies and service level agreements.

NA4 (Application Identification and Support task focus on applications for genomics and proteomics) aims at supporting the introduction of new users, new communities, and new virtual organisations into the project. The team will also proactively develop and disseminate appropriate information to the relevant groups.

NA5 (Policy and International Cooperation activity) will allow EGEE to operate in the global development environment and to ensure Europe can work constructively with the major Grid players from around the world. RedIRIS participates in NA5 too, with the organization of the European Grid Policy Forum and the production of a series of Grid Policy White Papers and Roadmaps.

CROSSGRID Project (IST-2001-32243)

The objective of CROSSGRID is the development of a Grid infrastructure for applications that require real-time user interaction. The Spanish institutions participating in the project are the University of A Coruña (UC), the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), the Galician Supercomputing Centre (CESGA), the Institute for Particle Physics (IFIC), the Institute for Physics of Cantabria (IFCA), and the University of Valencia (UV). The main contributions of these partners in each workpackage are:

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  In WP1 (Application Development) there are contributions by the IFCA, USC/UC/CESGA, and IFIC. WP1 tackles applications on data analysis high-energy physics, data mining for meteorology, and weather forecast and air pollution models.
  
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  WP2 (Grid Application Programming Environments) is contributed to by CSIC, USC, and CESGA.
  
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  WP3 (New Grid Services and Tools) is contributed to by IFIC.
  
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  WP4 (International Testbed Organization) is lead by CSIC (the workpackage responsible), with USC contributing to the work.
  

ONTOGRID (IST-2004-511513)

The objective of ONTOGRID is to produce the technological infrastructure for the rapid prototyping and development of knowledge-intensive distributed open services for the Semantic Grid (SG). The results aim at developing Grid systems that optimize cross-process, cross-company and cross-industry collaboration. ONTOGRID will adopt a case-guided strategy based on test applications and will deliver a prototype at the end of the project. Within ONTOGRID, a new OGSA-compliant methodology with a framework and reference architecture for the SG will be developed, driven by requirements of two use cases: quality analysis for satellite missions (involving integration of heterogeneous information sources) and insurance settlement (involving a large number of human and computational services and information transport). Within this framework, current Knowledge Technologies (ontology tool suites, software agents and negotiation techniques, metadata annotation, reasoning methods) will be enhanced to be Grid-aware (or Grid-enabled) in order to become scalable, secure and robust. These services and technologies will allow enabling a selection of Grid Services (GS) to become knowledge-aware and to show how they might operate at the knowledge level. The resulting infrastructure will be subject to algorithmic analysis and performance evaluation.

The partners in this project are the Technical University of Madrid, UPM, Intelligent Software Components S.A., and Deimos Space S.L. from Spain; Acklin B.V. and Boyd International B.V. from the Netherlands; The University of Liverpool and The Victoria University of Manchester from United Kingdom, and finally the Technical University of Crete, Greece.

FLOWGRID (IST-2001-38433)

FLOWGRID is a Grid computing environment to enable Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations to be set-up, executed, and monitored on geographically and organisationally dispersed computing resources. It will make it possible for users to:

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  Register to the service via the FlowGrid Portal.
  
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  Interactively create or modify CFD cases.
  
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  Examine available resources and choose where to run his/her problem.
  
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  Submit a case to run on a chosen system.
  
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  Monitor and influence the solution process.
  
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  View the results in real time as the solution progresses.
  
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  Interactively view the results at the end of a computation.
  

The FlowGrid consortium consists of six project partners, namely CERTH/CPERI (Greece), HSVA (Germany), Skoda (Czech Republic), Symban (UK), ZIB (Germany) and University of Zaragoza/Fluid Mechanics Group (Spain).

APART/APART2 Projects (IST-2000-28077)

The Automatic Performance Analysis: Resources and Tools (APART) working group networks five European development projects working on automatic performance analysis tools with experts from the US and from industry. The projects are based on the APART specification language (ASL) for performance properties of parallel programs and on the specified property catalogues for OpenMP, MPI, HPF, and hybrid programming. Besides collaboration among those projects on tools for parallel systems, the working group is investigating requirements and techniques for performance analysis in Grid environments. The work is structured into three work packages:

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  WP1 - Performance Property Specification Techniques.
  
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  WP2 - Common Interfaces and Integration Technologies.
  
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  WP3 - Automatic Performance Analysis and Grid Computing.
  

WP1 will first determine a set of possible implementation techniques for the data repository and for processing ASL specifications. The techniques selected by the local projects are evaluated at the end of the working group with respect to their performance impacts. WP2 will facilitate and guide the implementation work in the local projects via an intensive information exchange. WP3 will develop a list of performance tool requirements in close collaboration with application groups running applications on the Grid and investigate whether automatic analysis techniques can be exploited in the Grid context.

The Spanish partner in this project is the UAB (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona). Other participants in this project are The Victoria University of Manchester, the University of Cyprus, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Oregon Eugene, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison

iASTRO PROJECT (COST Action 283)

iAstro is a 4-year COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology) network which started at the end of 2001. The aim of iAstro is to ensure the best possible application of new theory and tools in the astronomy application domain, and simultaneously Grid-enabling the most appropriate areas of the application domain. The means applied by iAstro to achieve these ends are, respectively, further developing and bridging the many ongoing projects (i.e., disseminating new theories and good practices), and through selection and bringing Grid-appropriate areas of the application domain into focus (i.e., expressing application requirements in the direction of computer scientists, and data and information analysts). An additional objective is the spinning out of new national and international projects, where appropriate and needed.

The Spanish participants in iAstro are CAB / UCM, the University of Granada, and the University of Barcelona. Their research focuses on heterogeneous and multimedia data and robotic observatories.

AKOGRIMO (FP6-IST 2004-4293)

Sponsored by the large base of mobile users, Akogrimo is aiming at radically advancing the pervasiveness of Grid computing across Europe. To achieve this goal, in addition to embracing layers and technologies which are supposed to make up the so-called Next Generation Grids (e.g. knowledge-related and semantics-driven Web services), Akogrimo will devise a blueprint of an NGG which exploits and closely co-operates with evolving mobile Internet infrastructures based on IPv6. The Akogrimo project will extend and adapt capabilities of 3G networks for complex distributed applications based on Grid middleware and will extend existing Grid architecture solutions beyond current reference models, such as the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA).

The Spanish partners are Technical University of Madrid and Telefónica, Investigación y Desarrollo (project coordinator).

CoreGRID PROJECT (IST-2004-4265)

CoreGRID is an European "Network of Excellence" (NoE) funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Program. CoreGRID aims at building a virtual European-wide Research Laboratory that will achieve scientific and technological excellence in the domain of large scale distributed, Grid, and Peer-to-Peer technologies aiming at realizing a vision of what should be a Grid infrastructure. This emerging architecture will integrate in a seamless way the existing Grid and other proposals such as P2P (peer-to-peer) taking in W3C and other relevant standardization bodies concepts and standards.

CoreGRID involves 42 partners from 18. The Spanish representation comes from the Technical University of Catalonia, and its research is currently focussed in three different activities:

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  Computational models for Web and Grid based models of computation. The proposed models are based on the notion of computing with ”approximate'' data values, illustrated using a number of examples.
  
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  Combinatorial optimisation using algorithmic skeletons implemented in C++.
  
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  PRAM, BSP models for parallelism, correctness, and program transformation.
  

The rest of the participants in this project are CETIC (Belgium); University of Chile (Chile); University of Cyprus (Cyprus); Technical Research Centre of Finland (Finland); European Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, French National Research Council, National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (France); Zuse Institute Berlin, University of Muenster, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (FhG), University of Dortmund, University of Passau (Germany); Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology (Greece); Information Science and Technologies Institute (CNR-ISTI), University of Pisa, University of Lecce, University of Calabria (Italy); Delft University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands); CYFRONET (Poland); University of Coimbra (Portugal); Royal Institute of Technology, Swedish Institute of Computer Science (Sweden); Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (Switzerland); The Queen's University of Belfast (QUB), University of Cambridge, University of Cardiff, Victoria University of Manchester, The University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, University of Westminster (UK).

Provenance (FP6-IST 2001-511085)

The concept of Provenance comes from the study of fine art, where it refers to the trusted, documented history of some work of art, through which the object attains an authority that allows scholars to understand and appreciate its importance and context relative to other works of art. Objects without proven history may be treated with some scepticism. The same concept may be applied to data and information generated within a computer system, particularly when the information is subject to regulatory control over an extended period of time. Today's Grid architectures suffer from limitations such as lack of mechanisms to trace results and infrastructures to build up trusted networks. Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual and aggregated services that produced it. The aim of the Provenance project is to design, conceive, and implement industrial-strength open provenance architecture for Grid systems, and to deploy and evaluate it in complex Grid applications, namely aerospace engineering and organ transplant management.

The University of Calatonia is the Spanish partner in this project. The University of Southampton and the University of Wales are the other partners in Provenance.