WP4: HPC Research GRID

The major partners in this work-package were the HPC centres. They started by deploying an heterogeneous European computational Grid, resulting from the availability of dedicated computational resources at each site.

This HPC research Grid was used as a test-bed for the development of distributed applications, and as an arena for co-operative work among EUROGRID partners. The ultimate objective was the integration of full production systems in the Grid, and a close collaboration among different sites in solving major scientific challenges, using computational resources distributed on a European scale.

The work-package concentrated on the development of general distributed applications not represented in the domain-specific work-packages WP1 to WP3. The distributed applications that had the biggest added value for scientific research, are those concerned with multi-physics simulations or relying on complex computational chains, based on the coupling of different software modules. These distributed applications demand the coherent and complementary use of different computational resources, and map very naturally to a heterogeneous supercomputing environment.

Sequential coupling of software modules was achieved from the start, through the initial functionality of UNICORE. More ambitious applications involving real-time interaction of software modules were developed using portable and well established standards like CORBA, etc. This work-package addressed some issues related to the quality of services of the HPC research Grid, like Internet bandwidth, administration and operation issues, and security issues, too.

d.mallmann@ fz-juelich.de
10-May-2004
URL: <http://www.eurogrid.org/wp4.html>