Nordic Grid and SweGridAmsterdam 20 May 2003 In his Grid overview presentation at the HP Grid Conference last week in Amsterdam, Lennart Johnsson Director, PDC supercomputer centre of the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm Sweden, mentioned several Grid initatives on a Swedish (SweGrid), Scandinavian (Nordic Grid) and European Scale (European Grid Support Centre).
One of the Grid projects in which the PDC is involved is an effort called "SweGrid". This is the first Swedish national Grid project. Partners are the high-performance centres in Sweden: HPC2N, UPPMAX, PDC, NSC, UNICC, and LUNARC. Each site has a PC cluster with a local data cache. SweGrid has shared back-up and archival storage facilities. SweGrid is funded by K.A. Wallenberg Foundation and the Swedish Research Council (SNIC).
Another Grid project is the Nordic Grid Consortium (NGC). This is a Grid collaboration between Nordic HPC Centres. Founding centres were PDC in Sweden, Parallab in Norway and CSC in Finland.
The NGC will do joint Grid middleware and application development. It will work on networked computation, storage and visualisation facilities as well as scientific instruments and provide a production Grid deployment platform. Cycle sharing and a common Portal for job submission will also be offered.
The Nordic Grid Consortium has a diversity of platforms in its founding centres. The collective resources add up to 5 Fflop/s processing power, a primary storage of 2 TByte, disk of 10 TByte, tape storage of 100 Tbyte and a number of advanced visualisation facilities. More information can be found on http://www.nordicgrid.net.
The European Grid support Center is an intitiative to start supporting Grids on a European scale. The primary contacts for The European Grid support Center (EGSC) are at PDC (Sweden), CERN (Switzerland), and CLRC for the e-Science Programme (UK).
It was founded because international co-operation is critical for the success of transnational Grids. Successful Grid operations require co-operation of multiple organisations in areas as problem resolution, system support, user support and software validation.
Furthermore, they want to share human expertise and collaborate on education, training and outreach. There are also plans to operate a dedicated, professional operations capability for essential infrastructure elements and applications. It is all in very embryonal stages.
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