Porting HPC Applications to Grids and Clouds - Cloud, Grid and High Performance Computing: Emerging Applications - page 27

the installation of a limited number of leadership-
class Tier-0 supercomputers in Europe.

tivities. JRA1 (Integrated DEISA Development
Environment) aims at an integrated environment
for scientific application development, based on
a software infrastructure for tools integration,
which provides a common user interface across
multiple computing platforms. JRA2 (Enhancing
Scalability) aims at the enabling of supercomputer
applications for the efficient exploitation of current
and future supercomputers, to cope with a produc-
tion infrastructure characterized by an aggressive
parallelism on heterogeneous HPC architectures
at a European scale.

The DEISA Infrastructure Services

The essential services to operate the infrastructure
and support its efficient usage are organized in
three Service Activities: Operations, Technolo-
gies, and Applications:
Operations refer to operating the infrastructure
including all existing services, adopting approved
new services from the Technologies Activity,
and advancing the operation of the DEISA HPC
infrastructure to a turnkey solution for the future
European HPC ecosystem by improving the op-
erational model and integrating new sites.
Technologies cover monitoring of technolo-
gies in use in the project, identifying and select-
ing technologies of relevance for the project,
evaluating technologies for pre-production de-
ployment, and planning and designing specific
sub-infrastructures to upgrade existing services
or deliver new ones based on approved technolo-
gies. User-friendly access to the DEISA Super-
computing Grid is provided by DEISA Services
for Heterogeneous management Layer (DESHL,
2008) and the UNiforme Interface for COmputing
Resources (UNICORE, 2008).
Applications cover the areas 'applications
enabling' and 'extreme computing projects',
'environment and user related application sup-
port', and 'benchmarking'. Applications enabling
focuses on enhancing scientific applications
from the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative
(DECI), Virtual Communities and EU projects.
Environment and user related application support
addresses the maintenance and improvement of the
DEISA application environment and interfaces,
and DEISA-wide user support in the applications
area. Benchmarking refers to the provision and
maintenance of a European Benchmark Suite for
supercomputers.
In DEISA2, two Joint Research Activities
(JRA) complement the portfolio of service ac-

DECI: DEISA Extreme
Computing Initiative for
Supercomputing Applications

The DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative
(DECI, 2010) has been launched in May 2005
by the DEISA Consortium, as a way to enhance
its impact on science and technology. The main
purpose of this initiative is to enable a number
of “grand challenge” applications in all areas of
science and technology. These leading, ground
breaking applications must deal with complex,
demanding and innovative simulations that would
not be possible without the DEISA infrastructure,
and which benefit from the exceptional resources
provided by the Consortium. The DEISA applica-
tions are expected to have requirements that cannot
be fulfilled by the national HPC services alone.
In DEISA2, the single-project oriented activi-
ties (DECI) are qualitatively extended towards
persistent support of Virtual Science Communities.
This extended initiative benefits from and builds
on the experiences of the DEISA scientific Joint
Research Activities where selected computing
needs of various scientific communities and a
pilot industry partner were addressed. Examples of
structured science communities with which close
relationships are established are EFDA and the
European climate community. DEISA2 provides a
computational platform for them, offering integra-