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EUROGRID
Application Testbed for European GRID Computing
Abstract
The EUROGRID project is establishing trans-European GRIDs for important application areas using UNICORE as a base. The Eurogrid partners are leading European HPC centres, application developers and user organisations from research and industry. Biology, meteorology and engineering applications will be made GRID-aware. Functional extension are being developed in the areas of failsafe file transfer, dynamic resource discovery and brokering, application coupling, ASP services and interactive access.
Objectives
The objectives of the project are:
- To establish a European GRID network of leading High Performance Computing centres from different European countries.
- To operate and support the EUROGRID software infrastructure. The EUROGRID software will use the existing Internet network and will offer seamless and secure access for the EUROGRID users.
- To develop important GRID software components and to integrate them into EUROGRID (fast file transfer, resource broker, interface for coupled applications and interactive access).
- To demonstrate distributed simulation codes from different application areas (Biomolecular simulations, Weather prediction, Coupled CAE simulations, Structural analysis, Real-time data processing).
- To contribute to the international GRID development and to liase with the leading international GRID projects.
- To release as a product the EUROGRID software components. After the end of the project, the EUROGRID software will be available as a supported product.
UNICORE architecture, the technical base of the EUROGRID project
The participating European HPC centres
Technical Approach and Testbed
In EUROGRID the concept of GRID computing is applied to specific application domains and user scenarios.
- Bio-GRID for bio-molecular applications and scientific users
- Meteo-GRID for meteorological applications and scientific/general users
- CAE-GRID for engineering applications and engineers as users
- HPC Research GRID for traditional HPC applications and scientific users
In addition horizontal technologies and GRID middleware components useful across application domains will be developed (efficient data transfer, resource brokerage, ASP services, application coupling, interactive access). These new components are integrated into the base GRID system and are evaluated in the HPC-GRID testbed.
Applications
In the BIO-GRID activity, EUROGRID develops intuitive user interfaces for selected bio-molecular packages, and compatibility interfaces between these applications and their databases. The results is an integrated bio-molecular toolkit that allows streamlined work processes, and a job execution component that makes all systems in the BIO-GRID available for simulation runs with a uniform and intuitive user interface.
For many uses, precise meso- or microscale weather predictions are required: agriculture, pollution prediction, traffic and public event planning depend on precise localised weather data. To accommodate these users, a flexible framework for on-demand localised weather prediction is being developed in EUROGRID by the German weather service.
The coupling of several CAE codes, each one simulating different aspects of a system's behaviour, is emerging as a key technology to accelerate design and construction of complex systems, reducing prototyping and testing time and costs. A general mechanism for the coupling of simulation packages is integrated in the EUROGRID system, and its use is demonstrated with real-world applications from EADS CCR.
Many industrial companies, in particular small and medium enterprises, lack in-house access to sufficiently powerful HPC systems, yet are increasingly depending on CAE systems and simulation packages. For them, the application service provider scheme offers an attractive solution: instead of having to buy and maintain HPC systems and the necessary software licenses, an external provider of computing power runs their jobs and bills them according to the system time actually used. Within EUROGRID, T-Systems integrates ASP-specific functions and demonstrates an ASP system for the leading CAE packages on top of EUROGRID.
Innovation
GRID computing is a new way to provide and access computer resources via Internet.
EUROGRID lowers the thresholds for users to use High Performance Computing resources. Hardware and software is available "on demand", HPC becomes affordable because only the actual usage is paid and no experts need to be involved. The provision of such "on-demand" services will be a new business of HPC centres and software vendors. EUROGRID will make several applications available under this model.
Furthermore, EUROGRID is designed and implemented to support both inter- and intra-net use, in particular for the CAE-GRID. This capability will be a key factor in the industrial uptake.
EUROGRID starts from an existing GRID system (UNICORE) and develops new innovative components in the areas of efficient data transfer mechanisms, resource brokerage, coupled applications, interactive access and computational steering.
- Project name:
- EUROGRID
- Contract no:
- IST-1999-20247
- Project type:
- RTD
- Start date:
- 01/11/2000
- Duration:
- 36 months
- Total budget:
- €3,446,497
- Funding from the EC:
- €2,065,769
- Total effort in person-months:
- 392
- Website:
- http://www.eurogrid.org
- Contact person:
- Karl Solchenbach
- email: karl.solchenbach@pallas.com
- tel: +49-2232-1986-14
- fax: +49-2232-1896-29
- Project participants:
- CNRS/IDRIS FR
- DSH - D
- DWD - D
- EADS - FR
- ETH CH
- Fecit - UK
- FZ Juelich - D
- ICM PL
- Pallas - D
- Univ Bergen - NO
- Univ Manchester - UK
- Keywords:
- Computational GRID
- High performance computing
- Seamless access
- UNICORE
- Collaboration with other EC funded projects:
- DAMIEN
- DataGRID
- GÉANT
- GRIDSTART
- GRIP