:: 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

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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.