:: Grid.it : a National Italian Project
on Enabling Platforms for High-performance Computational Grids
Marco Vanneschi
Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa
National Coordinator of Grid.it |
Download the slides [ppt|pdf] |
Abstract
The Grid.it project, coordinated by the National Research Council
(CNR), is one of the Strategic Projects on Enabling Technologies
for Information Society (FIRB) of the National Resarch Programme
of the Ministry for University and Research. The main partners
are three CNR institues (ISTI Pisa, ICAR Cosenza-Naples, and ISTM
Perugia), INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physics), CNIT (National
Consortium on Telecommunication), and ASI (Italian Space Agency),
with a large participation of University departments associated
to the main partners. The goal is to study and to experiment systems
and software tools that turn out to be innovative at all levels
of Grid platforms oriented towards scalable VOs, as well as to
demonstrate their capabilities through some specific applications.
A special emphasis of Grid.it is placed on the high-performance
requirement of the applications developed on Grids. This means
that the study of the integration of systems and resources, as
well as heterogeneity and dynamic situations management, must
explicitly handle the case of Grid nodes being high-performance
systems, such as parallel machine architectures or (Beowulf) clusters.
The research on high-performance extends to all the platform levels,
from high bandwidth networks to middleware services, and, in particular,
to programming tools and environments and to resource management.
At the programming model and environment level the high performance
requirement implies that, in the design of scalable VOs, a unifying
approach in the development of application should be used. Such
approach is able to take into account both the aspects related
to the distribution of computations and resources, and of those
related to parallelism. The programming environment must therefore
be characterized by absolute portability on different hardware-software
systems (or different hardware-software combinations) in an heterogeneous
and dynamic context. The research on resource management includes
aspects of maximal importance as discovery, brokering, scheduling,
monitoring and performance evaluation/prediction.
High speed networks needed to support enabling Grid platforms
for scalable VOs is an internationally recognized hot
topic. Within this research activity an important role is played
by experiments on very high bandwidth optical networks, based
on photonic technology for Grid platforms with high performance
sites that extend to metropolitan area.
Beyond the aspects concerning programming environments and resource
management, the software technology studied in this proposal includes
some fundamental aspects related to security, data intensive services,
knowledge discovery services, Grid portals. The design and implementation
of scientific libraries, suitable to be used in an heterogeneous
and dynamic context, completes the research on programming environments.
The platform, underlying the system levels above, is based on
the evolutions of Globus and, in general, on OGSA specifications.
A Grid infrastructure will be implemented, on a national scale,
based on the GARR network and using, in some metropolitan sites,
optical fiber interconnection.
The proposal includes the development of some demonstrators selected
within applicative fields that are of maximum interest, not only
for their scientific value, but also as testbeds for high-performance
Grid platforms: Earth Observation, Geophysics, Astronomy, Biology,
Computational Chemistry.
After a global introduction to the objectives of Grid.it, this
talk will be focused on the innovative software technology of
the project, especially new Grid programming environments and
related issues on resource management.