GridCoord DoW

Sweden

Summary of activities

Grid systems related research was initiated in the 1990s, emphasis was on co-ordinated use of HPC systems and clusters. It originated at the centers of PDC/KTH in Stockholm, NSC at Linköping University and at HPC2N, Umeå University. In the beginning of 2002 the Swedish Research Council decided to establish a HPC metacenter, SNIC, Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing. The same year the major grid initiative SweGrid was initiated.

No comprehensive national strategy for grid research and development is established at this time.

Forming a main research line, several research projects in Sweden are carrying out generic grid computing research, dedicated to make grid technology and its software infrastructure more mature and user friendly. Examples include a Grid Resource Brokering tool, grid accounting system, and research in grid security.

Additional Grid research activities are funded by VINNOVA since 2001 in the context of a RTD programme in Network based software technologies. This line of research is applications driven, and industrial participation is a requirement here. An example is the development of a framework for modelling and simulation on computational grids, GridModelica.

Sweden has a quite capable research community in the grid area and a good participation in international co-operations. It is a basis for potential expansion with new national initiatives.

Key projects

The major national grid computing initiative is SweGrid, which is a computational grid consisting of 600 computers distributed over six sites throughout Sweden:

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  Lunarc, Lund
  
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  UNICC, Göteborg
  
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  NSC, Linköping
  
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  PDC, Stockholm
  
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  Uppmax, Uppsala
  
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  HPC2N, Umeå
  

The governing body for SweGrid is the SNIC (Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing) which is organized under the Swedish Research Council. The goals of the SweGrid project are to stimulate grid development and to serve as a test bed. The focus is on e-Science, but there is also awareness of the industrial potential. SNIC has the pronounced vision of having all its resources available in a Swedish Grid infrastructure.An overall vision has not been formulated.

Grid software infrastructure R&D

SNIC grid research is focusing on software infrastructure needed to make grid technology more mature and user friendly, addressing grid resource brokering, grid security and interactive tools, i.e. grid portals.

Applications driven grid related R&D

VINNOVA has goals of industrial applications and growth and is funding projects with industrial participation and with some focus on grid applications for industry. Example projects are developing a framework for simulation and modelling on computational grids, and data base technology for high performance numeric data handling in grid systems.

Visionary, next generation kind of R&D

A new Global Computing Centre of Excellence is being set up in Stockholm, formed by KTH, SICS and FOI, the Swedish Defence Research Agency. It will pursue R&D towards a vision of a dependable service-oriented Global Computing Environment, and will involve significant industrial participation. More information is available at http://www.global-computing.org/.

Local activities

All of the sites in SweGrid have e-Science activities:

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  Lund University
  
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  CTH and Göteborg University
  
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  Linköping University
  
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  KTH, Karolinska Institutet, and Stockholm University
  
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  Uppsala University
  
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  Umeå University
  

Other universities are also active, notably Växjö University in connection with the LOIS project.

Recently the Swedish Research Council and its Committee for Research Infrastructures (including Grid Technology for e-Science) has begun investigation and more comprehensive planning of Grid for e-Science activities. The domains covered are many, besides the Elementary Particle Physics also Astro Science, Biomedical Science, Earth Science, Material Science, etc.

Grid research in infrastructure and application driven developments

Umeå university: Generic Grid computing research – multiproject with

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  Grid resource brokering, giving minimum estimated total time to delivery for the individual application
  
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  Grid accounting, SGAS, SweGrid Accounting System, giving grid-wide accounting and real-time allocation enforcement
  
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  Semi-automatic Grid interface-generation for numerical software libraries
  
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  High-level data replication system.
  

Grid security research (coordinated by KTH)

KTH: Grid security research – focused on trust models, authentication with special emphasis on file access in distributed file systems, authorization, accounting and security policy.

Grid accounting, SGAS (coordinated by Umeå university).

KTH and SICS, Stockholm:

GES3 Grid enabled scalable self-organizing services – develop a decentralized infrastructure (using distributed hash tables) providing such basic services as discovery, name-based communication, publish/subscribe mechanisms, and group membership and communication services. Then build, test and validate a grid-enabled (i.e. OGSA compliant) application service platform, with services like storage management, searching and indexing, group services, and data distribution. SICS, KTH and Truvé & Vasell Innovation AB. Industrial partners also Ericsson Microwave and Generic Systems.

Uppsala university: GRID data base handling – developing Grid Stream Data Manager for high performance numeric data handling (usable by LOFAR/LOIS). Industrial partner MySQL.

Parallel Object Query System for Expensive Computations (POQSEC) – development of a data manager and customizable query processor to achieve high performance for scientific queries. It scales up by utilizing the grid to transparently and dynamically incorporate new nodes and clusters.

Grid accounting, SGAS (coordinated by Umeå university).

Grid security research (coordinated by KTH).

Linköping university: GRIDModelica – developing a framework for simulation on computational grids, based on the Modelica simulation and modelling language. Industrial partners SKF and MathCore Engineering.

Växjö university:Adaptive GRID-service architecture – developing architecture for a distributed, time-coherent radio/IT-network (used by LOFAR/LOIS) with an optimization engine monitoring system state and dynamically adapting. Industrial partner AeroTech Telub.

LOIS – the LOFAR Outrigger In Scandinavia. The LOIS project is e-Science in space physics with Växjö as hub, but it is also an initiative with several important Grid aspects, from stream architecture to data base technology to 10 Gb/s network connections.