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D-Grid

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The D-Grid Initiative (German Grid Initiative) builds a sustainable grid infrastructure for education and research (e-Science) in Germany. The D-Grid infrastructure will help to establish methods of e-Science in three core areas:

  • Grid Computing
  • Knowledge Management
  • e-Learning

D-Grid started September 1st, 2005 and consists of six Community Projects and an integration project (DGI) as well as several partner projects.

Integration Project

The D-Grid integration project is a part of the D-Grid Initiative and has to integrate all developments from the different community projects in one common D-Grid platform. The D-Grid integration project will act as a Grid resource and service provider for the science community in Germany. The project office is located at the Institute for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe. The resources to ensure a sustainable Grid infrastructure are provided by four work packages:

  • Work Package 1: D-Grid Base-Software. The major task of this work package is to provide several different middleware packages. These are the Globus Toolkit, UNICORE, LCG/gLite, GridSphere and the Grid Application Toolkit (GAT). The community projects linked together in the D-Grid integration project are supported during the installation, operation and if needed and possible the customisation of the Base-Software.
  • Work Package 2: Deployment and operation of the D-Grid infrastructure. Work package 2 builds up a Core-D-Grid. This will be used as a prototype to test the operational functionality of the system. This work package also deals with the challenges of Monitoring, Accounting and Billing of the Grid resources.
  • Work Package 3: Networks and Security. The network infrastructure in D-Grid is based on the DFN Wissenschaftsnetz X-WiN. Work package 3 will provide extensions to the existing network infrastructure according to the needs of Grid middleware used in D-Grid. Further tasks are to build an AA-Infrastructure in D-Grid, develop firewall concepts for Grid environments and set up Grid specific CERT services.
  • Work Package 4: D-Grid project office. The work package is responsible for the integration of the deliverables from the Grid integration project and the deliverables from the different community projects in one common D-Grid platform. Work package 4 also deals with the challenge of archiving sustainability in D-Grid and grid-based e-Science systems generally.

Communities

Currently there are six community projects participating 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 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.

HEP-Grid

The HEP-Grid Project has its focus on High Energy, 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 important extensions to the grid middleware from the Enabling Grids for E-scienceE (EGEE) and LHC Computing Grid (LCG) projects. They provide significant improvements for data analysis of experiments currently taking data and for those planned in the future at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or 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. The flexible use of grid technologies will combine the 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 in order 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.

Engineering research is inherently application and industry oriented. The support of virtual prototyping and the optimization of scientific engineering operational sequences is therefore 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 well known research institutes in the area of medicine, biomedical informatics and life sciences into a consortium. Numerous associated partners from industry, healthcare and research facilities ensure a broad representation of these communities.

The main goal of MediGRID is the development of a Grid middleware integration platform enabling eScience services for biomedical life science. Therefore the consortium allocated the tasks in different modules. The four methodological modules (middleware, ontology, resource fusion and eScience) plan to incrementally develop and provide a Grid infrastructure while taking into account the need of the biomedical users. The user communities are represented in three research modules for biomedical informatics, image processing and clinical research.

TextGrid

While grid technologies have first been developed for the natural and the life sciences, there are exciting opportunities for deploying grid technologies and e-Science concepts in other areas as well. TextGrid is a grid project in the humanities, and thereby contributes to the emerging e-Humanities.

It aims 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.

Partner Projects

Several Partner Projects are involved in the D-Grid Initiative.

WISENT

The e-Science project WISENT ("Wissensnetz Energiemeteorologie") has the aim to optimize the cooperation of scientific organizations in the field of Energy Meteorology employing Grid technologies. The main focus of scientific research within Energy Meteorology is the investigation of the influence of weather and climate on transformation, transport, and utilisation of energy.

Funding

On the basis of the D-Grid Initiative more than 100 German research facilities are funded with about 20 billion Euros for a period of 3 years by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

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