 |
|
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
|
Special Features:
FROM TESTBED TO REALITY: GRID
STEPS UP
United Kingdom plans for Grid computing changed gear this week. The
pioneering
European DataGrid (EDG) project came to a successful conclusion at the end of
March, and on April 1 a new project, known as Enabling Grids for E-Science in
Europe (EGEE), begins. The United Kingdom is a major player in both projects,
providing key staff and developing crucial areas of the technology. While EDG
tested the concept of large-scale Grid computing, EGEE aims to create a
permanent, reliable Grid infrastructure across Europe.
Grid computing pulls together the processing power and data storage of
thousands of computers, spread over hundreds of locations. Professor Steve
Lloyd, Chair of the United Kingdom Particle Physics Grid, explained that,
"Individual scientists using the Grid won't need to know where the data is
held or which machines are running their programs. So whereas a PC on the web
provides information or access to services, such as banking or shopping, a PC
on the Grid offers its computing power and storage."
The European DataGrid (EDG) project started three years ago, with the
United
Kingdom Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) providing
£2.1m funding, as one of six main partners. EDG took a major step towards
making the concept of a world-wide computing Grid a reality, building a test
computing infrastructure capable of providing shared data and computing
resources across the European scientific community. At peak performance, there
were more than 1,000 computers on the EDG test bed, sharing more than 15TB (15
million million bytes) of data at 25 sites across Europe, Russia and Taiwan.
Grid resources were provided to over 500 scientists.
After a massive software development effort involving seven major software
releases over three years, the final version of EDG software is already in use
in three major scientific fields: particle physics, biomedical applications
and earth observations. The software is exploited by 10 bio-medical
applications and five earth observation institutes.
In Particle Physics, Grid computing will help scientists deal with a data
deluge from CERN's new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
due to go online in 2007. LHC will produce millions of billions of bytes of
real and simulated data. GridPP, the United Kingdom's Particle Physics Grid,
has been working with EDG over the last three years. GridPP resources
contributed a large part to the EDG testbed, with processors at 16 United
Kingdom sites and around 100,000 computing jobs submitted through United
Kingdom computers.
GridPP also helped to develop much of the important 'middleware' for EDG.
This
allows the software being used by the scientists to talk to the Grid's
hardware, distributing computing tasks efficiently around the network and
dealing with issues such as security, ensuring that only authorised users can
access the Grid. GridPP members will also be heavily involved in the next
stage of European Grid computing, EGEE.
The EGEE project will build on the success of EDG and take Grid technology
even further by establishing a Grid infrastructure available across Europe, 24
hours a day. Fabrizio Gagliardi, former DataGrid project leader and project
director of EGEE, said: "Whereas EDG provided European scientists with the
first convincing large-scale demonstrations of a functioning Data Grid, EGEE
will make the technology available on a regular and reliable basis to all of
European science, as well as industrial Research and Development. Like the
World Wide Web, which was initially conceived at CERN for rather specialised
scientific purposes, the impact of this emerging Grid technology on European
society is difficult to predict in detail at this stage, but it is likely to
be huge."
EGEE will capitalise on the experience and achievements of EDG and many
other
EU, national and international Grid projects. It will primarily concentrate on
three core areas:
- to build a consistent, robust and secure Grid network.
- to continuously improve and maintain the middleware in order to deliver
a
reliable service to users.
- to attract new users from industry as well as science and ensure they
receive the high standard of training and support they need.
EGEE consists of 70 partner institutions covering a wide-range of both
scientific and industrial applications. Two pilot areas have been selected --
the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid; and Biomedical Grids, where several
communities are facing equally daunting challenges to cope with the flood of
bioinformatics and health care data.
Four United Kingdom organizations are partners in EGEE: PPARC, the Council
for
the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), the National
e-Science Centre in Edinburgh and University College London (UCL). In
addition, there are five United Kingdom contributing organizations, which are
part of the United Kingdom and Ireland Federation set up to extend deployment
of this European-wide Grid: University of Glasgow, Imperial College London,
University of Leeds (on behalf of the White Rose Consortium), University of
Manchester and University of Oxford.
The Grid will be built on the EU Research Network GEANT, as well as
national
infrastructure such as the United Kingdom's SuperJANET academic network. UCL,
through its e-Science Network Centre of Excellence, has primary responsibility
for developing and deploying new EGEE network services, such as monitoring the
networks and allocating space on them. Through this, the United Kingdom will
play a major role in developing the critical relationship between EGEE and
GEANT.
CCLRC (at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) will lead a partnership of a
number of United Kingdom institutes in delivering production quality Grid
services as part of EGEE and will provide core infrastructure services to the
EGEE Grid. A program focussed on producing high quality Grid information and
monitoring services will also be developed.
This builds on the substantial experience built up over the last three
years
through participation in the EDG project and in running pilot Grid
services.
The EGEE training program, to be led by the United Kingdom National
e-Science
Centre (NeSC), will involve the active participation of 22 of the 70 EGEE
partner organizations. During the next two years it will run training events
and workshops all over Europe, as well as delivering customised training
events within Grid computing conferences. The end-product of this work will be
a series of tried and tested high-quality training modules, available for
general use via the Web.
EGEE is a two-year project conceived as part of a four-year program, where
the
results of the first two years will provide the basis for assessing subsequent
objectives and funding needs.
|