This is a comprehensive list of Grid computing infrastructure projects.
These projects attempt to make large physical computation infrastructures available for researchers to use:
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.
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.
United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.
TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.
The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) is open-source software for building climate, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, and other Earth science software applications. These applications are computationally demanding and usually run on supercomputers. The ESMF is considered a technical layer, integrated into a sophisticated common modeling infrastructure for interoperability. Other aspects of interoperability and shared infrastructure include: common experimental protocols, common analytic methods, common documentation standards for data and data provenance, shared workflow, and shared model components.
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.
The D-Grid Initiative was a government project to fund computer infrastructure for education and research (e-Science) in Germany. It uses the term grid computing. D-Grid started September 1, 2005 with six community projects and an integration project (DGI) as well as several partner projects.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is a high performance computing and networking center founded in 1986 and one of the original five NSF Supercomputing Centers. PSC is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.
GARUDA(Global Access to Resource Using Distributed Architecture) is India's Grid Computing initiative connecting 17 cities across the country. The 45 participating institutes in this nationwide project include all the IITs and C-DAC centers and other major institutes in India.
CNGrid is the Chinese national high performance computing network supported by 863 Program.
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.
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 MTA SZTAKI Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary, from around 2005 through 2010.
The Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS), as a department of MTA SZTAKI, is a research laboratory in distributed grid and cloud technologies. LPDS is a founding member of the Hungarian Grid Competence Centre, the Hungarian National Grid Initiative, and the Hungarian OpenNebula Community and also coordinates several European grid/cloud projects.
OpenNebula is a cloud computing platform for managing heterogeneous distributed data center infrastructures. The OpenNebula platform manages a data center's virtual infrastructure to build private, public and hybrid implementations of Infrastructure as a Service. The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization and cloud deployments based on the KVM hypervisor, LXD/LXC system containers, and AWS Firecracker microVMs. The platform is also capable of offering the cloud infrastructure necessary to operate a cloud on top of existing VMware infrastructure. In early June 2020, OpenNebula announced the release of a new Enterprise Edition for corporate users, along with a Community Edition. OpenNebula CE is free and open-source software, released under the Apache License version 2. OpenNebula CE comes with free access to maintenance releases but with upgrades to new minor/major versions only available for users with non-commercial deployments or with significant contributions to the OpenNebula Community. OpenNebula EE is distributed under a closed-source license and requires a commercial Subscription.
The SHIWA project within grid computing was a project led by the LPDS of MTA Computer and Automation Research Institute. The project coordinator was 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.
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.
openQRM is a free and open-source cloud computing management platform for managing heterogeneous data centre infrastructures.
Science gateways provide access to advanced resources for science and engineering researchers, educators, and students. Through streamlined, online, user-friendly interfaces, gateways combine a variety of cyberinfrastructure (CI) components in support of a community-specific set of tools, applications, and data collections.: In general, these specialized, shared resources are integrated as a Web portal, mobile app, or a suite of applications. Through science gateways, broad communities of researchers can access diverse resources which can save both time and money for themselves and their institutions. As listed below, functions and resources offered by science gateways include shared equipment and instruments, computational services, advanced software applications, collaboration capabilities, data repositories, and networks.
