E-Grid - Toward the Creation of a European Grid CommunityPoznan 24 May 2000 The concept of Grid Computing started as a project to link supercomputing sites, but now it has grown far beyond its original intent. In fact, there are many applications that can benefit from the grid infrastructure, including collaborative engineering, data exploration, high -throughput computing, and of course distributed supercomputing. The European Grid Forum, E-Grid is an open forum and is not a legal. The community includes individuals from European research institutes, universities and companies working in the field of wide area computing and computational grids. At the recently held First E-Grid workshop, several; working groups have been established. New workshops ar planned this Autumn in Munich Germany and this Winter, probably in Lecce Italy.
The popularity of the Internet and the availability of powerful computers and high-speed networks as low-cost commodity components are changing the way we use computers today. This technology opportunity has led to the possibility of using networks of computers as a single, unified computing resource. It is possible to cluster or couple a wide variety of resources including supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, and special classes of devices distributed geographically and use them as a single unified resource, thus forming what is popularly known as a computational grid [1].
The concept of Grid Computing started as a project to link supercomputing sites, but now it has grown far beyond its original intent. In fact, there are many applications that can benefit from the grid infrastructure, including collaborative engineering, data exploration, high -throughput computing, and of course distributed supercomputing. According to Larry Smarr, the NCSA Director, a Grid is a seamless, integrated computational and collaborative environment. Through the computational grid the scientists will be able to access virtually unlimited computing and distributed data resources. The grid will provide a group collaboration environment. Through a Web browser, users will be able to view and select all the grid resources and services in a virtual infinite machine room. To build a grid requires the development and deployment of a number of services, including those for: resource discovery, scheduling configuration management, security, and payment mechanisms in an open environment [2] [3]. Currently, there are many grid projects worldwide. A more complete listing can be found in [4][5]. With the main aim to create a culture about Grid Computing providing the scientific and technologic foundations for its affirmation, two important International open forums have been created: Grid and E-Grid.
The Grid Forum is a US (mainly) community-initiated forum of individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or "grid" technologies. Grid Forum focuses on the promotion and development of Grid technologies and applications via the development and documentation of "best practices," implementation guidelines, and standards with an emphasis on rough consensus and running code. Grid Forum efforts are also aimed at the development of a broadly based Integrated Grid Architecture that can serve to guide the research, development, and deployment activities of the emerging Grid communities. Defining such an architecture will advance the Grid agenda through the broad deployment and adoption of fundamental basic services and by sharing code among different applications with common requirements. Wide-area distributed computing, or "grid" technologies, provide the foundation to a number of large-scale efforts utilizing the global Internet to build distributed computing and communications infrastructures. As common Grid services and interoperable components emerge, the difficulty in undertaking these large-scale efforts will be greatly reduced and, as importantly, the resulting systems will better support interoperation.
The main motivation to establish the E-Grid initiative is to create a forum for improving the conditions for Grid-related research in Europe. E-Grid is an open forum and is not a legal. The community includes individuals from European research institutes, universities and companies working in the field of wide area computing and computational grids.
E-Grid is supposed to be a medium for information exchange as well as a place where researchers, supercomputing centers, and other GRID-oriented research institutions or companies from all over Europe can find partners for future or current projects. There exist a significant number of high-quality projects and research results in
Europe. E-Grid is similar to what US researchers have successfully established by creating the Grid Forum but reflecting the special conditions that we find in Europe. E-Grid is meant as a platform for gathering information about all Grid-related projects in Europe and ensure that individual projects fit better together. In addition, E-Grid is intended to be highly visible, supporting the Grid Idea, stimulating projects and collaboration, and finally, be efficient. One of our long-term goals is to build a European Grid.
The first informal E-Grid meeting took place in Portland, Oregon (USA) during the Supercomputing'99 conference. About 30+ representatives from different European and American institutions took part in this meeting. During that meeting it was decided to organize the 1st E-Grid Workshop in April'2000, in the framework of the ISThmus'2000 conference in Poznan, Poland. During the April E-Grid Workshop, hosted by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, the following working groups have been started: The 2nd E-Grid meeting will take place during the EuroPar conference (Munich 29 August - 1 September 2000). To host the 3rd E-Grid Workshop in winter 2000, the University of Lecce (Italy) has been proposed. ConclusionLarry Smarr observes in [2] that grid computing has serious social consequences and is going to have as revolutionary an effect as railroads did in the American mid West in the early nineteenth century. Instead of a 30 to 40 year lead-time to see its effects, however, its impact is going to be much faster. He concludes that the effects of computational grids are going to change the world so quickly that mankind will struggle to react and change in the face of the challenges and issues they present. So, at some stage in the future, our computing needs will be satisfied in the same pervasive and ubiquitous manner that we use the electricity power grid. The analogies with the generation and delivery of electricity are hard to ignore, and the implications are enormous. In fact, the computational grid is analogous to electricity (power) grid and the vision is to offer a (almost) dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end resources irrespective their location of physical existence and the location of access. References [1] Foster I. and Kesselman C. (editors), The Grid: Blueprint for a Future Computing Infrastructure, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, USA, 1999. Websites
The European Grid Forum, E-Grid
Giovanni Aloisio (ISUFI/HPC-Lab, University of Lecce-Italy), Domenico Laforenza, (CNUCE-CNR, Pisa, Italy), Jarek Nabrzyski (Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, Poland), Alexander Reinefeld (ZIB Berlin, Germany) |
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