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In-Depth Information
GRID CASE STUDY: HPC ON THE
DEISA E-INFRASTRUCTURE
The DEISA Project
DEISA is the Distributed European Initiative for
Supercomputing Applications, funded by the EU
in Framework Programme 6 (DEISA1, 2004 -
2008) and Framework Programme 7 (DEISA2,
2008 - 2011). The DEISA Consortium consists
of 11 partners, MPG-RZG (Germany, consor-
tium lead), BSC (Spain), CINECA (Italy), CSC
(Finland), ECMWF (UK), EPCC (UK), FZJ
(Germany), HLRS (Germany), IDRIS (France),
LRZ (Germany), and SARA (Netherlands). Fur-
ther centers were integrated as associate partners:
CEA-CCRT (France), CSCS (Switzerland), and
KTH (Sweden).
DEISA developed and supports a distrib-
uted high performance computing infrastructure
and a collaborative environment for capability
computing and data management. The resulting
infrastructure enables the operation of a power-
ful supercomputing Grid built on top of national
supercomputing services, facilitating Europe's
ability to undertake world-leading computational
science research. DEISA is instrumental for ad-
vancing computational sciences in scientific and
industrial disciplines within Europe and is paving
the way towards the deployment of a cooperative
European HPC ecosystem. The existing infrastruc-
ture is based on the coupling of eleven leading
national supercomputing centers, using dedicated
network interconnections (currently 10 GBs) of
GÉANT2 and the NRENs.
DEISA2 developed activities and services
relevant for applications enabling, operation, and
technologies, as these are indispensable for the
effective support of computational sciences in the
area of supercomputing. The service provisioning
model has been extended from one that supports
a single project (in DEISA1) to one supporting
Virtual European Communities (now in DEISA2).
Collaborative activities are carried out with
European and other international initiatives. Of
strategic importance is the cooperation with the
PRACE (2008) initiative which is preparing for
As one example, in the following, we will briefly
discuss the DEISA Distributed European In-
frastructure for Supercomputing Applications.
A more detailed description can be found in
(Gentzsch, 2010, 2011). DEISA is different
from many other Grid initiatives which aim at
building a general purpose Grid infrastructure
and therefore have to cope with many (almost)
insurmountable barriers such as complexity, re-
source sharing, crossing administrative (and even
national) domains, handling IP and legal issues,
dealing with sensitive data, working on interoper-
ability, and facing the issue to expose every little
detail of the underlying infrastructure services
to the Grid application user. DEISA avoids most
of these barriers by staying very focused: The
main focus of DEISA is to provide the European
supercomputer user with a flexible, dynamic, user-
friendly supercomputing ecosystem (one could say
Supercomputing Cloud, see next paragraph) for
easy handling, submitting, and monitoring long-
running jobs on the best-suited and least-loaded
supercomputer(s) in Europe, trying to avoid the
just mentioned barriers. In addition, DEISA of-
fers application-enabling support. For a similar
European funded initiative especially focusing
on enterprise applications, we refer the reader to
the BEinGRID project (2008), which consists of
18 so-called business experiments each dealing
with a pilot application that addresses a concrete
business case, and is represented by an end-user,
a service provider, and a Grid service integrator.
Experiments come from key business sectors such
as multimedia, financial, engineering, chemistry,
gaming, environmental science, and logistics and
so on, based on different Grid middleware solu-
tions, see (BEinGRID, 2008).
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