Communities
Six community projects participated in the D-Grid Initiative:
AstroGrid-D
AstroGrid-D, also referred to as the German Astronomy Community Grid (GACG), is a joint research project of thirteen astronomical institutes and grid-oriented computer science groups, supported by supercomputing centers. The main objective of AstroGrid-D is the integration of German research facilities into a unified nationwide research infrastructure in the field of astronomy. The goal is to improve the efficiency and usability of hardware and software resources including computer clusters, astronomical data archives, and observational facilities such as robotic telescopes. AstroGrid-D supports the standards of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) and cooperates closely with international projects on grid development.
AstroGrid-D is managed by the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP).
C3-Grid
At the Collaborative Climate Community Data and Processing Grid (C3-Grid) scientific researchers are trying to understand the earth system including their subsystems like oceans, atmosphere and biosphere. For the last decades the amount of data has increased enormously in the field of climate research. On the one hand, due to rapid rise in computing power scientists are now able to use models with higher resolution and perform long term simulations. The scientists are able to couple models for the mentioned subsystems in complex cumulative simulations producing petabytes of output which is collected in distributed data archives. On the other hand, monitoring the earth with satellites results in a second huge data stream for climate research. Up to now, no uniform access to these distributed data is available what creates a bottleneck for the scientific research. The C3-Grid proposes to link these distributed data archives.
The management of C3-Grid has the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven. (For further information www.c3grid.de)
GDI-Grid
The GDI-Grid ("Geodateninfrastrukturen-Grid" - "Spatial Data Infrastructure Grid") project focuses on solutions for efficient integration and processing of geodata based on GIS and SDI technologies. The project will integrate GDI and Grid technologies in a working GDI-Grid infrastructure and thus demonstrate the complementarity of both fields of science. Distributed geospatial data—currently accessed via standardized GIS and SDI services—will build the basis for this endeavour. This data basis can be put to more use by processing it and merging it with other data, creating standards-based, multi-functional generic SDI services.
The project focuses on data, models, services and workflows for spatial data infrastructures. Services for integration, processing and management of spatial data are to be developed and implemented within the D-Grid infrastructure. A proof of concept will be given using a number of representative scenarios such as emergency routing for disaster management, flood simulation and sound propagation simulation.
The project is managed by the Leibniz University Hannover at the Leibniz University IT Services (LUIS).
HEP-Grid
The HEP-Grid Project focused on High Energy Physics, Nuclear as well as Astroparticle Physics. The main task of HEP-Grid is to optimize the data analysis using distributed computing and storage resources. The project developments are extensions to the grid middleware from the Enabling Grids for E-scienceE project of the European Grid Infrastructure and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid (LCG) project. They provide significant improvements for data analysis of experiments currently taking data and for those planned at the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC).
For the HEP-Grid Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY), "German Electron Synchrotron") in Hamburg collaborates with eight German research facilities and universities and a set of associate partners.
InGrid
InGrid is a community project in the field of Grid computing in engineering sciences. InGrid aims to enable engineering projects for grid-based applications and allow for the common, efficient use of common compute and software resources. Grid technologies were promised to combine with competences in modeling, simulation and optimization.
Five typical applications (foundry technologies, metal forming technologies, groundwater flow and transport, turbine simulation and fluid-structure interaction) are considered as showcases to cover the three central areas of computationally intensive engineering applications, that are coupled multi-scale problems, coupled multi-discipline problems, and distributed simulation-based optimization. In particular adaptive and scalable process models and grid based runtime environments for these tasks are developed.
The support of virtual prototyping and the optimization of scientific engineering operational sequences is an emphasis of the project. The project management for InGrid is provided by the High Performance Computing Center (Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum) Stuttgart (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart.
MediGRID
The joint project MediGRID unifies research institutes in medicine, biomedical informatics and life sciences into a consortium. Partners are from industry, healthcare and research facilities.
The main goal of MediGRID is the development of agGrid middleware integration platform enabling eScience services for biomedical life science. The project formed four modules (middleware, ontology, resource fusion and eScience), and developed a grid infrastructure for biomedical users. The user communities are represented in three research modules for biomedical informatics, image processing and clinical research.
SuGI
SuGI - Sustainable Grid Infrastructure - is a gap project of the German Grid Initiative. Its major task is to disseminate the knowledge of grid technology and to enhance its use. Thus, SuGI addresses all academic computing centers as well as enterprises, which still have not adopted grid technology. They will be supported in providing grid resources and services.
Experiences in the D-Grid projects will be made available to these institutions. Thus, SuGI offers own training courses; attends to external courses, create video and audio recordings and provide these online to the D-Grid communities via a scaling training infrastructure SuGI-Portal. SuGI claimed to develop training systems for grid middleware, simplify installation and servicing procedures, and work on the development and evaluation of legal and organizational structures.
TextGrid
While grid technologies were developed for the natural and the life sciences, there are opportunities for deploying Grid computing and e-Science concepts in other areas as well. TextGrid is a grid project in the humanities, and uses the buzzword "e-Humanities".
TextGrid promised to create a grid-based infrastructure for the collaborative editing, annotation, analysis and publication of specialist texts for researchers in philology, linguistics, and related fields. In addition to providing a comprehensive toolset, the project establishes an open platform for other projects to plug into the TextGrid.
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.
The Globus Toolkit is an open-source toolkit for grid computing developed and provided by the Globus Alliance. On 25 May 2017 it was announced that the open source support for the project would be discontinued in January 2018, due to a lack of financial support for that work. The Globus service continues to be available to the research community under a freemium approach, designed to sustain the software, with most features freely available but some restricted to subscribers.
E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable distributed collaboration, such as the Access Grid. The term was created by John Taylor, the Director General of the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Technology in 1999 and was used to describe a large funding initiative starting in November 2000. E-science has been more broadly interpreted since then, as "the application of computer technology to the undertaking of modern scientific investigation, including the preparation, experimentation, data collection, results dissemination, and long-term storage and accessibility of all materials generated through the scientific process. These may include data modeling and analysis, electronic/digitized laboratory notebooks, raw and fitted data sets, manuscript production and draft versions, pre-prints, and print and/or electronic publications." In 2014, IEEE eScience Conference Series condensed the definition to "eScience promotes innovation in collaborative, computationally- or data-intensive research across all disciplines, throughout the research lifecycle" in one of the working definitions used by the organizers. E-science encompasses "what is often referred to as big data [which] has revolutionized science... [such as] the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN... [that] generates around 780 terabytes per year... highly data intensive modern fields of science...that generate large amounts of E-science data include: computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics" and the human digital footprint for the social sciences.
UNICORE is a grid computing technology for resources such as supercomputers or cluster systems and information stored in databases. UNICORE was developed in two projects funded by the German ministry for education and research (BMBF). In European-funded projects UNICORE evolved to a middleware system used at several supercomputer centers. UNICORE served as a basis in other research projects. The UNICORE technology is open source under BSD licence and available at SourceForge.
NorduGrid is a collaboration aiming at development, maintenance and support of the free Grid middleware, known as the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC).
Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) is a grid computing middleware introduced by NorduGrid. It provides a common interface for submission of computational tasks to different distributed computing systems and thus can enable grid infrastructures of varying size and complexity. The set of services and utilities providing the interface is known as ARC Computing Element (ARC-CE). ARC-CE functionality includes data staging and caching, developed in order to support data-intensive distributed computing. ARC is an open source software distributed under the Apache License 2.0.
Sun Cloud was an on-demand Cloud computing service operated by Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle Corporation. The Sun Cloud Compute Utility provided access to a substantial computing resource over the Internet for US$1 per CPU-hour. It was launched as Sun Grid in March 2006. It was based on and supported open source technologies such as Solaris 10, Sun Grid Engine, and the Java platform.
European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international research in many scientific disciplines. Following a series of research projects such as DataGrid and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, the EGI Foundation was formed in 2010 to sustain the services of EGI.
The INFN Grid project was an initiative of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) —Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics—for grid computing. It was intended to develop and deploy grid middleware services to allow INFN's users to transparently and securely share the computing and storage resources together with applications and technical facilities for scientific collaborations.
Computational particle physics refers to the methods and computing tools developed in and used by particle physics research. Like computational chemistry or computational biology, it is, for particle physics both a specific branch and an interdisciplinary field relying on computer science, theoretical and experimental particle physics and mathematics. The main fields of computational particle physics are: lattice field theory, automatic calculation of particle interaction or decay and event generators.
Techila Distributed Computing Engine is a commercial grid computing software product. It speeds up simulation, analysis and other computational applications by enabling scalability across the IT resources in user's on-premises data center and in the user's own cloud account. Techila Distributed Computing Engine is developed and licensed by Techila Technologies Ltd, a privately held company headquartered in Tampere, Finland. The product is also available as an on-demand solution in Google Cloud Launcher, the online marketplace created and operated by Google. According to IDC, the solution enables organizations to create HPC infrastructure without the major capital investments and operating expenses required by new HPC hardware.
The P-GRADE Grid Portal was software for web portals to manage the life-cycle of executing a parallel application in grid computing. It was developed by the Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary.
SLinCA@Home was a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in fields such as physics and materials science.
The SHIWA is a project led by the LPDS of MTA Computer and Automation Research Institute. The project coordinator is Prof. Dr. Peter Kacsuk, it started on 1 July 2010 and lasted two years. SHIWA was supported by a Grant from the European Commission's FP7 INFRASTRUCTURES-2010-2 call under grant agreement n°261585.
Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid, a nationwide computing infrastructure, built in 2009-2011, under the scientific project PL-Grid - Polish Infrastructure for Supporting Computational Science in the European Research Space. Its purpose was to enable scientific research based on advanced computer simulations and large-scale computations using the computer clusters, and to provide convenient access to the computer resources for research teams, also outside the communities, in which the High Performance Computing centers operate.
The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is a computer software platform for high performance distributed computing. It is developed and distributed directly by the EMI project. It is the base for other grid middleware distributions used by scientific research communities and distributed computing infrastructures all over the world especially in Europe, South America and Asia. EMI supports broad scientific experiments and initiatives, such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.
A data grid is an architecture or set of services that gives individuals or groups of users the ability to access, modify and transfer extremely large amounts of geographically distributed data for research purposes. Data grids make this possible through a host of middleware applications and services that pull together data and resources from multiple administrative domains and then present it to users upon request. The data in a data grid can be located at a single site or multiple sites where each site can be its own administrative domain governed by a set of security restrictions as to who may access the data. Likewise, multiple replicas of the data may be distributed throughout the grid outside their original administrative domain and the security restrictions placed on the original data for who may access it must be equally applied to the replicas. Specifically developed data grid middleware is what handles the integration between users and the data they request by controlling access while making it available as efficiently as possible. The adjacent diagram depicts a high level view of a data grid.
HUBzero is an open source software platform for building websites that support scientific activities.
DaviX is an open-source client for Webdav and Amazon S3 available for Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOSX and Linux. DaviX is written in C++ and provide several command line tools and a C++ shared library.
CyberGIS, or cyber geographic information science and systems, is an interdisciplinary field combining cyberinfrastructure, e-science, and geographic information science and systems (GIS). CyberGIS has a particular focus on computational and data-intensive geospatial problem-solving within various research and education domains. The need for GIS has extended beyond traditional forms of geographic analysis and study, which includes adapting to new sources and kinds of data, high-performance computing resources, and online platforms based on existing and emerging information networks. The name cyberGIS first appeared in Geographic Information Science literature in 2010. CyberGIS is characterized as digital geospatial ecosystems. These systems are developed and have evolved through heterogeneous computing environments, as well as human communication and information environments. CyberGIS can be considered a new generation of geographic information systems (GIS). These systems are based on advanced computing and information infrastructure, which analyze and model geospatial data, providing computationally intensive spatial analysis, modeling, and collaborative geospatial problem-solving at previously unprecedented scales.
