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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
SPACI SELECTS HP FOR STRATEGIC GRID COMPUTING IMPLEMENTATION
The Italian Southern Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructures
(SPACI) has selected HP as the lead technology partner in a project that will
establish a Grid-enabled research and development IT environment for its three
members, the Universities of Lecce and Calabria as well as the National
Research Council CPS/CNR in Naples. The Grid, which will initially comprise
three clusters of Itanium2-based HP Integrity servers running Linux, plus
services and applications, aims to integrate the geographically dispersed
computing resources of each research center into a Grid, allowing SPACI
scientists and engineers to more effectively collaborate and conduct national
and international research. Ultimately, SPACI's vision for the Grid is not
only to pave the way for future collaboration between Italian public and
industrial research, but to provide the Italian industry with top level
services and the knowledge of its scientists, thus helping achieve great
results at little cost.
Valued at approximately 3 million Euro over the next two years, the
development of the project will be led by HP. It is one of the first of its
kind in Europe, and represents a significant milestone in the development of
Grid computing. Also, it complements HP's strategy to deliver Grid-enabled
computing environments based on open standards. Together with industry
partners including Intel, HP will deliver HP XC high performance Linux
clusters based on HP Integrity rx2600 servers with High Performance Quadrics
Interconnect at each member site. Sixty-eight HP Integrity servers will be
based at both the University of Lecce and the National Research Council, and
13 HP Integrity servers at the University of Calabria together with 16 HP
AlphaServers. Each site will also feature an HP Storage Area Network (SAN),
plus a range of cluster management and software development tools.
HP's experience and leadership in Grid computing provides a solid foundation
for the company to head the project implementation which will include both
academic and enterprise application of Grid computing. HP's solution offers a
powerful means of virtualizing resources and enables collaboration between
users of these resources. These benefits reflect integral elements of HP's
Adaptive Enterprise strategy, which aims at perfectly synchronizing business
and IT to capitalize on change.
With a computing power of up to 1837 GFlops, HP's Grid implementation for
SPACI will provide the scalability, flexibility and performance required to
support the most memory-intensive and demanding applications, even at peak
times. Tapping into HP's unique industry knowledge, underpinned by HP's
Collaboration and Competency Network (HP CCN), gives the SPACI consortium the
ability to share experiences and expertise plus access to a global technical
computing community.
"Our decision to select HP in favor of a major competitor was based on a
number of critical factors", said professor Giovanni Aloisio, University of
Lecce, and president of the SPACI Consortium. "HP Italy's obvious commitment
to the project and our access to HP's technical computing team (HPTC) at an
EMEA level, provided invaluable support and consultancy, and demonstrated
their belief in the strategic importance of the project."
"HP's unique CCN Program was another cornerstone of its success in winning
the contract, and clearly differentiated HP from its competitors. No one else
was able to offer the experience and knowledge that HP demonstrates via this
initiative which, crucially, allows us to further tap into HP's expertise and
industry collaborations, and includes us as part of a wider community that
will prove invaluable to our work. In addition, we believe that HP's
partnership approach, which includes working closely with key third parties
such as Intel to deliver the infrastructure and software development tools and
direct support, is pivotal to the project's implementation", Aloisio
continued.
Collaboration And Investment To Benefit The Region
Together with HP, SPACI will build on a legacy of conducting
multi-disciplinary application-driven high performance computing, to provide a
powerful, sophisticated yet cost-effective computing resource that can handle
projects and research requiring industrial-strength computational power. HP's
model for the project is based on creating a center of excellence at each
individual site, which will develop its own unique competencies. Following
this model will allow SPACI to fulfil its objective of extending the use of
the Grid beyond public research, offering the Grid's resources to be used for
commercial collaboration and innovation by the local industry. By effectively
allowing companies to "rent" the Grid for development purposes, and enabling
them to tap into the knowledge of each center of excellence, it can facilitate
the rapid deployment of resources for projects, thereby ultimately helping to
generate investment and employment opportunities in the region as well as
improving the time to market and cost of developing new products within the
region.
Martin Walker, scientific research manager EMEA for HP, said, "The SPACI Grid
initiative is a highly strategic and significant project for which HP is
providing both consultancy services, and the product solution that forms the
backbone of the Grid infrastructure. In light of this, we have given it the
very highest priority within HP at both an Italian and a European level. As a
leading provider of Grid solutions, we have been involved in a number of high
profile Grid implementations across the globe to date. We are delighted to be
playing such a key role in this project, which has exciting ramifications from
a technical and commercial standpoint. "
Application-Oriented Approach
As part of its aim to offer application-oriented Grid services, SPACI's R&D is
focused on the design and development of Problem Solving Environments (PSEs)
for remote sensing, medical imaging and bioinformatics, for atmospheric and
climate modeling as well as for industrial simulation. Moreover, SPACI is
leading the development of Grid-oriented middleware based on the Globus
toolkit. SPACI is actively involved in both European and national Grid
projects.
SPACI will use software developed by the European GridLab project. Both HP and
the University of Lecce are participants in GridLab -- a major European effort
in the research and development of applications and middleware tools for Grid
environments. Funded by the European Commission, GridLab will produce a set of
application-oriented Grid services and toolkits providing capabilities such as
dynamic resource brokering, monitoring, data management, security, adaptive
services and more. Services are accessed using the Grid Applications Toolset
(GAT). The GAT provides applications with access to various GridLab services,
resources tools etc, in a way that allows end users and application developers
to use and build applications on the Grid, without needing to know details
about the runtime environment in advance.
Moreover, SPACI is one of the main Italian sites of the EU's EGEE (Enabling
Grids for E-science in Europe) project which integrates current national,
regional and thematic Grid efforts to create a seamless European Grid
infrastructure for the support of the European Research Area.
About SPACI
The Italian Southern Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructures
(SPACI) is a partnership among the Universities of Lecce and Calabria as well
as the Italian Research Council, based on three geographically spread High
Performance Computing (HPC) centers located in Southern Italy. Those centers
are the University of Lecce's ISUFI/ CACT (Center for Advanced Computational
Technologies), the Center for Research on Parallel Computing and
Supercomputers (CPS) of the National Research Council (CNR), now section of
the CNR Institute of HPCN (ICAR/CNR), and the MIUR/HPC Center of Excellence of
University of Calabria. SPACI, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education,
University and Research, has been established to pursue excellence in the
field of Computational Science and Engineering.
The original SPACI partnership has been recently extended to create a "SPACI
Consortium." The purpose of the SPACI Consortium is to create a broad
collaboration between public and private research compliant with guidelines
for scientific and technological policy issued by the Italian government. The
SPACI Consortium consists of three entities today: the University of Lecce, HP
Italy, and a company created by the three partnership institutions with the
name Spaci SrL. The president of the SPACI Consortium is Giovanni Aloisio of
the University of Lecce, while the president of Spaci SrL is Almerico Murli of
the University of Naples Federico II. Two additional institutions will shortly
join the SPACI Consortium: the University of Calabria and the Italian National
Nanotechnology Laboratory located in Lecce.
About HP
HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and
institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure,
personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and
printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, HP revenue totaled
$76.8 billion. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com .
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