The motivation of GARUDEA, originated from the need of sharing of high-end computational resources with the larger scientific and engineering community across India. Emerging High Performance Computing (HPC) applications in the country require integration of geographically distributed resources. Seamles, transparent access from anywhere in the country is also needed. According to Rajendra Josh, this is exactly what computational Grids address.

GARUDAA was preceded by Proof of Concept phase of project initiated by the Department of IT, of the Government of India in November 2004. It was a test bed for Grid technology and Grid concepts and applications leading to the plan for the main Grid initiative.

GARUDA supports several access methods to get on the Grid. It includes an access portal and Problem Solving Environments (PSE). PSE's are available for Bio-informatics and for the Community Atmospheric Model (CAM).

For developing Grid applications, there is a complete development and debugging environment within GARUDA, called Gridhra. For collaboration amongste researchers at different sites, GARUDA also implements Access Grid.

The function of the Grid Middleware in GARUDA is to enable transparent access to the heterogeneous and distributed resources. Middleware components include schedulers, resource brokers and security mechanisms. For operational support, Globus 2 is installed. For Grid Labs this is Globus 4. As Grid Scheduler, GARUDA uses Moab from Cluster Resources. In addition there are many local schedulers on the clusters.

GARUDA includes many sites, including the C-DAC centres in Bangelore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune. In the C-DAC centre in Bangelore. Moab Workload manager for Grids is used at all theses sites. All have a Linux cluster running Torque as local job manager. In Bangelore thre is in addition a Sloaris cluster running Torque and an AIX cluster running Load Leveler.

The clusters designed by C-DAC, are called PARAM. The network interconnect they use is PARAMNet. Reconfigurable computing systems specially designed for bioinformatics and cryptanalysis have been completed.

In total GARUDA connects 45 institutions all over India. 22 institutions are connected using 100 Mbps and 23 using 10 Mbpis bandwidth connections. To monitor the Grid, Paryavekshanam a grid-monitoring tool is used.

GARUDA resources consists of a percentage of the usage of a clusters. This way, 8 C-DAC centres at Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad & Chennai will contribute part of their computing resources. There have been Grid Labs at Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad. C-DAC plans to install a 10 Tflop/s supercomputer. This will also be made available on the Grid. Several other GARUDA partners also provide resources.

Two example applications have been ported onto the Grid; Disaster management and Bioinformatics.

GARUDA has set up several collaborations. Most are for developing and using applications. However, ther is also the EU-India Grid project, in which Grid experience in the EU and in India is exchanged, and Grids are connected for specific applications.

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