e-Science park Amsterdam

Science park Amsterdam intends to become an international focal point of e-Science developments with initiatives in the areas of virtual laboratory, data and computational grid deployment, particle physics, multimedia, biodiversity and bio-informatics. Science park Amsterdam wants to offer researchers the opportunity to conduct their research in a close collaboration with researchers elsewhere.

Science park Amsterdam, is one of The Netherlands¬?? largest concentrations of internationally renowned scientific institutes and technologically innovative businesses. The infrastructure includes the national centre for high performance computing SARA, the third largest Internet Exchange in the world (AMS-IX) and the national and international network connectivity of SURFnet including "NetherLight", a multiple 10GigE switching facility for high-performance access to participating networks with dedicated lambdas to the StarLight facility in Chicago and to CERN in Switzerland.

Currently various e-Science application projects running on top of Grid middleware are being carried out between the institutes at Science park Amsterdam and external national and international partners.

The realisation of the e-Science vision of the Park is not limited to the required investments in ICT infrastructure, but will be expanded to cover large joint and collaborative efforts from all parties concerned: scientists from various application domains, service providers and computer scientists.

The vision report recommends not only to further expand the already existing e-science infrastructure at the Science park (high bandwidth connectivity, computing power, storage) but also to put in place a national e-Science programme like those deployed in the UK and USA. International collaboration with e-Science centres in Europe and elsewhere is also required. A focal point of investments should be the establishment of various local, national and international test bed environments for integration and validation of e-Science technology and applications.

The centre should install a local backbone infrastructure with a network speed of several tenths of Gbps range, the report recommends.Today¬??s computing capacity of the Science Park (1 Tflop/s) should be expanded to at least 50-100 Tflop/s within 5 years from now. Next generation (prototype) technology must be researched and put in place to give space to and stimulate new scientific ideas.

The Science Park should in the same time scale install hundreds of terabytes online and petabytes nearline storage capacity, available through a campus-wide Storage Area Network (SAN) with Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) facilities.

The report also considers an Access Grid node at the Science park Amsterdam to be a prerequisite.

The report says that a service-oriented rather than a hardware-oriented approach should be predominant, the primary focus of the future ICT infrastructure should be on approachability and accessibility. Therefore investments are needed in Grid and portal middleware deployment, operation, support and maintenance, the operation of a Grid certification authority, resource brokerage, e-science helpdesk, e-science tutorials, a web based e-Science support centre and support for e-Science applications.