Enabling Desktop Grid for e-Science (EDGeS)

Project Id

RI-211727

Abstract

The targets of the project are user communities that require large computing power not available or accessible in current scientific e-Infrastructures. In order to support the specific needs of these scientific and other communities The consortium will interconnect the largest European Service Grid infrastructure (EGEE) with existing Desktop Grid (DG) systems in a strong partnership with the EGEE consortium. Service Grids (SG) are more flexible and can accommodate a broader variety of applications than Desktop Grids, however, their setup and maintenance require more efforts, highly skilled IT specialist, and dedicated resources. On the other hand, Desktop Grids are currently restricted solely to a subclass of compute-intensive applications but these easy-to-scale systems are able to collect 1-2 orders of magnitude more compute power by utilizing the involved spare and volunteer IT resources at a fraction of the cost. Making a bridge between these two types of Grid systems will enable the users to transparently execute applications on any arbitrary platform involved in the new infrastructure. Taking the advantages of both approaches the EDGeS infrastructure will represent a major step towards a European wide scientific grid where extremely large number of resources could be integrated to support grand-challenge scientific and other applications. The involvement of low-cost volunteer Desktop Grids into the European scientific grid infrastructure will contribute to the establishment of a sustainable European Grid infrastructure. The consortium is to extend the potential user communities for both beyond traditional scientists and current volunteer computing participants to further involve citizens, school students, and company employees, giving them an opportunity to become involved in science and to apply Grid technology in their every day life. In order to meet these objectives the project will connect Desktop Grid based city Grids, school grids and enterprise grids with EGEE.

Keywords

Internet public computing, Volunteer grid, Desktop grid, Service grid, Grid

Description

Objectives of the project

* Identify and involve new scientific communities that need large number of computing resources beyond the size of existing service grids, and also involve new type of user and resource provider communities beyond the scientific communities including citizens, school students, and company employees.
* Provide Grid application development interfaces and tools for the new scientific user communities in order to adapt their applications for the EDGeS e-infrastructure.
* Provide new trust mechanisms for the integrated e-infrastructure.
* Establish international collaborations, procedures and standards for the integration of Service Grids and Desktop Grids.
* Contribute to the establishment of a sustainable Grid infrastructure in Europe by integrating existing national and international service grids and desktop grids.

Project description

The consortium will create the integrated infrastructure in two phases. Phase 1 will establish a bridge enabling Desktop Grid projects to send task to any Virtual Organisations of EGEE that are ready to support such external projects. Phase 2 will create the reverse direction of the bridge extending EGEE with the capacity of connected Desktop Grids, and enabling their user communities to transparently utilize these new resources. During these phases the consortium will train both user communities how to use the integrated infrastructure and will support them in gridifying and making their applications desktop grid enabled for the new infrastructure.

Networking activities: Project administrative and technical management provides coordination of the consortium by putting in place a management structure, decision and communication mechanisms that enable the effective administrative and technical management of the project. Knowledge Services (dissemination, training and consulting) focuses on providing expert consulting and technical support to new communities in the adoption and customization of the EDGeS services.It will disseminate the knowledge produced by the project through the organization of focused events and will train scientists in developing applications for the e-infrastructure maintained by the consortium. This activity identifies new user communities that need the integrated e-infrastructure and organizes a User Forum for them. It also establishes an Industry Forum to attract companies who are willing to connect their local Desktop Grid based enterprise grids into the EDGeS e-infrastructure. Standardization procedures focuses on developing new standards for the generic integration of Service Grids and Desktop Grids.

Service activities: Combined EGEE-DG Service Management is an activity to establish and maintain an integrated e-infrastructure, a production service that combines EGEE and existing local and public Desktop Grid systems. Support Infrastructure Service Management provides an application testing and validation infrastructure, and the testing and validation procedure as service for the various user communities. It will also establish and maintain a training and application development infrastructure. Application Support Service supports current and future user communities in developing their applications for the integrated e-infrastructure. It will establish two application development centres where users will be provided with direct help in gridifying their applications and/or making them desktop grid enabled.

Joint Research activities: SG-DG Bridges Technologies develops the seamless integration of Service and Desktop Grids hiding the technology difference at the user level. This research activity includes tackling the issues of task scheduling across the different platforms and solving the security issues. SG-DG Support Technologies produces tools and application programming interfaces by which the user can adapt their applications to the integrated infrastructure. It also provides monitoring and benchmarking tools to support the interaction between both environments and assess the operation of the bridge. SG-DG Data Access focuses on extending the capabilities of the new bridge to provide mechanisms to transfer large data sets. It will extend and integrate current Peer-to-Peer data distribution technologies to adapt to the challenges of a Desktop Grid environment, builds a secure and reliable network that enforces data integrity. This activity will also enable current Desktop Grid applications to access the data distribution network.

User communities: The consortium will provide the integrated EGEE-DG infrastructure as service for already selected user communities that require large computing power in the field of drug discovery, engineering, combinatorial auction algorithms, fusion applications, bio-inspired algorithms, mobile systems, e-business, X-ray profile identification, simulation of the dynamics of laser devices, Distributed Audio Retrieval, 3D rendering and others. The project will establish a User Forum and an Industrial Forum in order to identify and support more user communities that would need the integrated infrastructure that will extend the EGEE e-infrastructure with more than 100.000 PCs of various Desktop Grids.

International aspects: EDGeS is ready to support any international user community that requires computing power beyond the existing service grids. The projects intends to strongly collaborate with any international grids and projects that need large computation power and hence are interested in integrating their Service Grid with Desktop Grids, or in integrating their Desktop Grid with Service Grids. The partners will actively participate in the work of Open Grid Forum in order to develop and promote standards for the interoperability and integration of service grids and desktop grids.

Coordinator

• Magyar Tudományos Akadémia,Számítástechnikai és Automatizálási Kutató Intézet (MTA SZTAKI)

Contacts

• Peter Kacsuk[PPL-200807-003]
  
  Detailed record - Similar records

General information

Timetable

From 01/2008 to 01/2010

Website

[www.edges-grid.eu]

Partners

• CNRS/IN2P3
• AlmereGrid (nl)
• CU
• Fundecyt (es)
• INRIA
• University og Wollongong (UoW)
• Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC)
• Magyar Tudományos Akadémia,Számítástechnikai és Automatizálási Kutató Intézet (MTA SZTAKI)
• CIEMAT

Budget

Total budget

€ 2,871,480.00

Grants

€ 2,450,000.00 [EC]

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