GridCoord DoW

Links to International and EU activities

The major participations in FP5 include:

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  European Data Grid (EDG) (SZTAKI)
  
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  GridLab (SZTAKI)
  
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  APART-2 (SZTAKI)
  

In the EDG project SZTAKI participated in the Monitoring WP and in the GridLab SZTAKI lead the Monitoring WP and contributed to the Information system WP. SZTAKI developed the Mercury Grid application and resource monitor in the GridLab project. SZTAKI played a bridge between EDG and

GridLab and created an integrated Grid Application Monitoring Infrastructure by combining Mercury of GridLab and RGMA of the EDG. In APART-2 SZTAKI lead the Grid Performance WP within which the APART White Paper on Performance Tools for the Grid: State of the Art and Future was composed. This played a similar role in the field of Grid performance tools as the Grid Middleware search form web page in the current GridCoord project.

In FP6 Hungarian institituions participate in the following projects:

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  EGEE (BME, ELTE, NIIFI, RMKI, SZTAKI)
  
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  SEE-GRID (SZTAKI, NIIFI)
  
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  CoreGrid (SZTAKI)
  
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  GridCoord (SZTAKI)
  
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  Grid Provenance (SZTAKI)
  

Hungarian partners in EGEE participate in the SA1 (running Grid centers), NA2 (dissemination), NA3 (training) and NA4 (application support) activities. In SEE-GRID SZTAKI leads the Grid Middleware WP and NIIFI participates in the CA management of the project.

SZTAKI participates in WP4, WP5, WP6 and WP7 virtual institutes of CoreGrid. In Grid Provenance SZTAKI does research on integration agent technology with Grid technology.

Italy

Summary of activities and strengths

The Grid research and technology activities in Italy have been developed along two main lines that recently have been co-ordinated through the national research project Grid.it.

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  One line consists in research projects that originated in the context of high-performance computing and metacomputing. The National Research Council (CNR) plays a central role in this process, with the collaboration of several Universities and in cooperation with other research institutions and agencies, in particular the Italian Space Agency (ASI), ENEA and INFN, as well as industries;
  
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  The other line consists in projects leaded by INFN on the development of Grid infrastructures for e-science, in cooperation with CERN, European projects, Universities, as well as industries.
  

The scientific strengths are mainly in the following topics:

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  Innovative software technology for Grids and enabling platforms: middleware and resource discovery, Grid abstract machines and operating systems, high-performance programming environments, cost models, adaptive and autonomic environments, scientific libraries, knowledge grid;
  
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  Production grid design and deployment, including Globus-based infrastructures, resource management and monitoring, data management, storage management, administration and security, Virtual Organizations;
  
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  Problem Solving Environments and Applications, notably in the following areas: Life Sciences, Computational Chemistry, Earth Observation Systems, Astronomy, Climatology, Knowledge Services and Knowledge Discovery, e-finance, e-business (Supply Chain Management).
  

Key projects

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 coordinates and tries to unify the various national efforts in Grid research and in Grid infrastructures.

Grid.it (Enabling Platforms for High-performance Computational Grids Oriented to Scalable Virtual Organizations, http://www.grid.it) is a FIRB Strategic Project in the area of Enabling Technologies for Information Society, coordinated by the National Research Council, granted by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research for three years (November 2002 – November 2005) for 8,1 M€ (total cost 11 M€). This 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 and application testbeds.

Moreover, Grid.it acted as the coordination initiative of the two lines (1, 2) 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 realizes a Grid Production Infrastructure that is 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. This means that the study of the integration of systems and resources, as well as heterogeneity and dynamic situations management, must explicitly handle the case of Grid nodes (which in general are geographically distributed or placed on private virtual networks) being high performance systems, such as parallel machine architectures or clusters. The research on high performance extends to all the platform levels, from high bandwidth network to middleware services, and, in particular, resource management, as well to tools and programming environments. At the programming tools and environment level the high performance requirement implies that, in the design of scalable VOs, a unifying approach in the development of application should be used. Such approach is able to take into account both the aspects related to the distribution of computations and resources, and of those related to parallelism. The research on resource management, at Middleware level, includes aspects of maximal importance as discovery, brokering, scheduling, monitoring and performance evaluation/prediction.

A Grid-aware version of the ASSIST (http://www.di.unipi.it/Assist.html) 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 optical networks, based on photonic technology for Grid platforms with high performance sites that extend to metropolitan area.

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: secure Grid environments and cooperation among Grid environments belonging to different organizations;
  
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  Data intensive services: federated database services, visualization and hierarchical management of data and meta-data according to advances and high-performance technique;
  
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  Knowledge discovery services: Grid services (data mining, search engines, etc.) that provide consistent, efficient and pervasive access to high end computational resources;
  
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  Grid portals: Grid enabled applicative services, e.g. the possibility provided to the user to submit tasks and collect results to remote jobs via Web interface.
  

The design and implementation of scientific libraries suitable to be used in a heterogeneous and dynamic context, such as the one of Grid, completes the research on programming environments. 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 implement and experiment the ideas and the results of the project, some 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 to 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)
  

A 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) are coordinated in the context of these six Research Units.

INFN projects on Grid infrastructures

The Grid MW components supported and released by INFN Grid (http://grid.infn.it) include:

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  WMS: Workload Management Service (with EDG, LCG, EGEE) for distributed scheduling and resource management in a Grid environment
  
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  Data Management Services
  

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  Virtual Db replication and Replicas Consistency Service (with Grid.it)
  
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  SToRM: Storage Resource Management Service for Storage allocation and File pinning with SRM interface over Unix file systems (with Grid.it)
  

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  Portals and Grid User Interface:
  

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  UI (with Datamat, Genius Portal (with Nice)
  
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  With PDA and Cellular Phone interface
  

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  VOMS: VO oriented Authentication/Authorization Service (with LCG, EGEE, Grid.it)
  
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  GridICE: General Grid Monitoring Service (with LCG)
  
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  DGAS: Economy based Grid Accounting Service (with EDG)
  
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  G-PBOX: VO oriented Policy enforcing framework (with Grid.it)
  
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  VO oriented User Support systems (with Grid.it)
  

All are made available with a general Open Source Licence, supported and evolving towards an Open Grid Service Architecture adhering to Web and “Grid Services” standards.

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), support 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, lead 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 coordinate legacy software of banks and finance institutions and to exploit knowledge in user profiling.
  
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  The Sfida project on e-business, lead by TXT e-solutions and coordinated 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, Foods 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.