Fabrizio Gagliardi

Building an infrastructure for scientific Grid computing: status and goals of the EGEE project

The state of computer and networking technology today makes the seamless sharing of computing resources on an international or even global scale conceivable. Scientific computing Grids that integrate large, geographically distributed computer clusters and data storage facilities are being developed in several major projects around the world. This article reviews the status of one of these projects, Enabling Grids for E-SciencE, describing the scientific opportunities that such a Grid can provide, while illustrating the scale and complexity of the challenge involved in establishing a scientific infrastructure of this kind.

European DataGrid Project: Experiences of Deploying a Large Scale Testbed for E-science Applications

The objective of the European DataGrid (EDG) project is to assist the next generation of scientific exploration, which requires intensive computation and analysis of shared large-scale datasets, from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, across widely distributed scientific communities. We see these requirements emerging in many scientific disciplines, including physics, biology, and earth sciences. Such sharing is made complicated by the distributed nature of the resources to be used, the distributed nature of the research communities, the size of the datasets and the limited network bandwidth available. To address these problems we are building on emerging computational Grid technologies to establish a research network that is developing the technology components essential for the implementation of a world-wide data and computational Grid on a scale not previously attempted. An essential part of this project is the phased development and deployment of a large-scale Grid testbed.The primary goals of the first phase of the EDG testbed were: 1) to demonstrate that the EDG software components could be integrated into a productionquality computational Grid; 2) to allow the middleware developers to evaluate the design and performance of their software; 3) to expose the technology to end-users to give them hands-on experience; and 4) to facilitate interaction and feedback between end-users and developers. This first testbed deployment was achieved towards the end of 2001 and assessed during the successful European Union review of the project on March 1, 2002. In this article we give an overview of the current status and plans of the EDG project and describe the distributed testbed.

The EGEE european grid infrastructure project

The state of computer and networking technology today makes the seamless sharing of computing resources on an international or even global scale conceivable. Extensive computing Grids that integrate large, geographically distributed computer clusters and data storage facilities have changed from representing a dream to becoming a vision and, with the Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe project (EGEE), a reality today. EGEE aims to provide a European Grid infrastructure for the support of many application domains. This infrastructure is built on the EU Research Network GEANT and exploits Grid expertise that has been generated by previous projects. EGEE is a EU funded project that involves 71 partners from Europe, Russia and the United States. The project started in April 2004 for a first phase of 2 years.

Grids and research networks as drivers and enablers of future internet architectures

Advanced network applications and research networks coexist in an uneasy symbiosis: new applications drive the deployment of the faster networks and new services needed for tomorrow, but can also threaten to overload the networks of today. Informed debate on these important topics requires a clear understanding of the technical requirements of new applications, the technical capabilities of current and future networks, and the policy constraints under which applications and research networks function. We seek here to contribute to this understanding by first summarizing the requirements of an emerging class of advanced Grid applications, and then discussing the technical and policy issues that affect how these requirements can be met. We focus in particular on the European situation in the latter discussion, but believe that most of our observations have broader applicability.

General-Purpose Parallel Computing in a High-Energy Physics Experiment at CERN

The CERN experiment NA48 is actively using a 64-processor Meiko CS-2 machine provided by the ESPRIT project GP-MIMD2, running, as part of their day-to-day work, simulation and analysis programs parallelized in the framework of the project. The CS-2 is also used as a data warehouse for NA48: data coming at high rate from the experiment are processed in real-time and written to DEC DLTs using the Meiko Parallel File System (PFS) as a high-speed I/O buffer.

First Results from the Parallelization of CERN's NA48 Simulation Program

The GP-MIMD2 project aims at demonstrating the effectiveness of using a European massively parallel supercomputer (MEIKO CS-2) in two different scientific production environments. One of its initial goals is the development of a parallel version of NMC, a specialized simulation code (developed by the CERN experiment NA48) which relies on a huge database (shower library) for maximum efficiency. NMCs memory requirements, combined with NA48s need of high statistics on a short timescale, make it a particular interesting candidate for MPP applications.

Large systems and specific solutions Summary of CHEP97 Session F

Abstract Current topics in large systems and specific solutions for high energy physics experiments are discussed with emphasis on those topics presented in papers submitted to the International Conference on Computing in High Energy Physics, Berlin, April 7–11, 1997.