D-Grid
Encyclopedia
The D-Grid Initiative builds a sustainable grid infrastructure for education and research (e-Science) in Germany. The D-Grid infrastructure will help to establish methods of e-Science in three core areas:
D-Grid started September 1, 2005 and consists of six Community Projects and an integration project (DGI) as well as several partner projects.
institutes and grid-oriented computer science
groups, supported by supercomputing
centers. The main objective of AstroGrid-D is the integration of German research facilities into a unified nationwide research infrastructure in the field of astronomy. The goal is to improve the efficiency and usability of hardware and software resources including computer clusters, astronomical data archives, and observational facilities such as robotic telescopes. AstroGrid-D supports the standards of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) and cooperates closely with international projects on grid development.
AstroGrid-D is managed by the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam
(AIP).
The management of C3-Grid has the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research
(AWI) in Bremerhaven
.
GIS and SDI
technologies. The project will integrate GDI and Grid technologies in a working GDI-Grid infrastructure and thus demonstrate the complementarity of both fields of science. Distributed geospatial data—currently accessed via standardized GIS and SDI services—will build the basis for this endeavour. This data basis can be put to more use by processing it and merging it with other data, creating standards-based, multi-functional generic SDI services.
The project focuses on data, models, services and workflows for spatial data infrastructures. Services for integration, processing and management of spatial data are to be developed and implemented within the D-Grid infrastructure. A proof of concept will be given using a number of representative scenarios such as emergency routing for disaster management, flood simulation and sound propagation simulation.
The project is managed by the University of Hanover at the Regional Computing Center for Lower Saxony (RRZN).
or the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC)
.
For the HEP-Grid Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY)
, "German Electron Synchrotron") in Hamburg
collaborates with eight German research facilities and universities and a set of associate partners.
Five typical applications (foundry technologies, metal forming technologies, groundwater flow and transport, turbine simulation and fluid-structure interaction) are considered as showcases in order to cover the three central areas of computationally intensive engineering applications, that are coupled multi-scale problems, coupled multi-discipline problems, and distributed simulation-based optimization. In particular adaptive and scalable process models and Grid based runtime environments for these tasks are developed.
Engineering research is inherently application and industry oriented.
The support of virtual prototyping and the optimization of scientific engineering operational sequences is therefore an emphasis of the project.
The project management for InGrid is provided by the High Performance Computing Center (Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum) Stuttgart (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart
.
The main goal of MediGRID is the development of a Grid middleware integration platform enabling eScience services for biomedical life science. Therefore the consortium allocated the tasks in different modules. The four methodological modules (middleware, ontology, resource fusion and eScience) plan to incrementally develop and provide a Grid infrastructure while taking into account the need of the biomedical users. The user communities are represented in three research modules for biomedical informatics, image processing and clinical research.
During this project, research experiences gained in the D-Grid projects will be made available to these institutions. Thus, SuGI offers own training courses; attends to external courses, create video and audio recordings and provide these online to the D-Grid communities via a scaling training infrastructure (SuGI-Portal). Further on, SuGI develops training systems for grid middleware, contributes to a simplification of installation and servicing procedures, and works on the development and evaluation of legal and organizational structures.
TextGrid
While grid technologies have first been developed for the natural
and the life sciences
, there are exciting opportunities for deploying grid technologies
and e-Science
concepts in other areas as well. TextGrid
is a grid project in the humanities
, and thereby contributes to the emerging e-Humanities.
It aims to create a grid-based infrastructure for the collaborative editing
, annotation, analysis and publication of specialist texts for researchers in philology, linguistics, and related fields. In addition to providing a comprehensive toolset, the project establishes an open platform for other projects to plug into the TextGrid.
The ValueGrids project partners are: SAP AG
(Coordinator), Conemis AG, IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH, University of Freiburg
and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
.
- Grid Computing
- Knowledge Management
- e-Learning
D-Grid started September 1, 2005 and consists of six Community Projects and an integration project (DGI) as well as several partner projects.
Integration Project
The D-Grid integration project is a part of the D-Grid Initiative and has to integrate all developments from the different community projects in one common D-Grid platform. The D-Grid integration project will act as a Grid resource and service provider for the science community in Germany. The project office is located at the Institute for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe. The resources to ensure a sustainable Grid infrastructure are provided by four work packages:- Work Package 1: D-Grid Base-Software. The major task of this work package is to provide several different middleware packages. These are the Globus Toolkit, UNICOREUNICOREUNICORE is a Grid computing technology that provides seamless, secure, and intuitive access to distributed Grid resources such as supercomputers or cluster systems and information stored in databases. UNICORE was developed in two projects funded by the German ministry for education and research...
, LCG/gLite, GridSphere and the Grid Application Toolkit (GAT). The community projects linked together in the D-Grid integration project are supported during the installation, operation and if needed and possible the customisation of the Base-Software. - Work Package 2: Deployment and operation of the D-Grid infrastructure. Work package 2 builds up a Core-D-Grid. This will be used as a prototype to test the operational functionality of the system. This work package also deals with the challenges of Monitoring, Accounting and Billing of the Grid resources.
- Work Package 3: Networks and Security. The network infrastructure in D-Grid is based on the DFN Wissenschaftsnetz X-WiN. Work package 3 will provide extensions to the existing network infrastructure according to the needs of Grid middleware used in D-Grid. Further tasks are to build an AA-Infrastructure in D-Grid, develop firewall concepts for Grid environments and set up Grid specific CERT services.
- Work Package 4: D-Grid project office. The work package is responsible for the integration of the deliverables from the Grid integration project and the deliverables from the different community projects in one common D-Grid platform. Work package 4 also deals with the challenge of archiving sustainability in D-Grid and grid-based e-Science systems generally.
AstroGrid-D
AstroGrid-D, also referred to as the German Astronomy Community Grid (GACG), is a joint research project of thirteen astronomicalAstronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...
institutes and grid-oriented computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
groups, supported by supercomputing
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
centers. The main objective of AstroGrid-D is the integration of German research facilities into a unified nationwide research infrastructure in the field of astronomy. The goal is to improve the efficiency and usability of hardware and software resources including computer clusters, astronomical data archives, and observational facilities such as robotic telescopes. AstroGrid-D supports the standards of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) and cooperates closely with international projects on grid development.
AstroGrid-D is managed by the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam
Astrophysical Institute Potsdam
Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam is a German research institute. It is the successor of the Berlin Observatory founded in 1700 and of the Astrophysical Observatory Potsdam founded in 1874. The latter was the world's first observatory to emphasize explicitly the research area of...
(AIP).
C3-Grid
At the Collaborative Climate Community Data and Processing Grid (C3-Grid) scientific researchers are trying to understand the earth system including their subsystems like oceans, atmosphere and biosphere. For the last decades the amount of data has increased enormously in the field of climate research. On the one hand, due to rapid rise in computing power scientists are now able to use models with higher resolution and perform long term simulations. The scientists are able to couple models for the mentioned subsystems in complex cumulative simulations producing petabytes of output which is collected in distributed data archives. On the other hand, monitoring the earth with satellites results in a second huge data stream for climate research. Up to now, no uniform access to these distributed data is available what creates a bottleneck for the scientific research. The C3-Grid proposes to link these distributed data archives.The management of C3-Grid has the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research
The Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research is a scientific organization located in Bremerhaven, Germany. The institute was founded in 1980 and is named after revolutionary meteorologist climatologist, and geologist Alfred Wegener...
(AWI) in Bremerhaven
Bremerhaven
Bremerhaven is a city at the seaport of the free city-state of Bremen, a state of the Federal Republic of Germany. It forms an enclave in the state of Lower Saxony and is located at the mouth of the River Weser on its eastern bank, opposite the town of Nordenham...
.
GDI-Grid
The GDI-Grid ("Geodateninfrastrukturen-Grid" - "Spatial Data Infrastructure Grid") project focuses on solutions for efficient integration and processing of geodata based onGIS and SDI
SDI
SDI may refer to:*SDI, also known as MDI, or Mini Dental Implants* SDI , a range of diesel engines by the Volkswagen Group for use in cars and vans* SDI a shoot 'em up by Sega* S.D.I...
technologies. The project will integrate GDI and Grid technologies in a working GDI-Grid infrastructure and thus demonstrate the complementarity of both fields of science. Distributed geospatial data—currently accessed via standardized GIS and SDI services—will build the basis for this endeavour. This data basis can be put to more use by processing it and merging it with other data, creating standards-based, multi-functional generic SDI services.
The project focuses on data, models, services and workflows for spatial data infrastructures. Services for integration, processing and management of spatial data are to be developed and implemented within the D-Grid infrastructure. A proof of concept will be given using a number of representative scenarios such as emergency routing for disaster management, flood simulation and sound propagation simulation.
The project is managed by the University of Hanover at the Regional Computing Center for Lower Saxony (RRZN).
HEP-Grid
The HEP-Grid Project has its focus on High Energy, Nuclear as well as Astroparticle Physics. The main task of HEP-Grid is to optimize the data analysis using distributed computing and storage resources. The project developments are important extensions to the grid middleware from the Enabling Grids for E-scienceE (EGEE) and LHC Computing Grid (LCG) projects. They provide significant improvements for data analysis of experiments currently taking data and for those planned in the future at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It is expected to address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature....
or the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC)
International Linear Collider
The International Linear Collider is a proposed linear particle accelerator. It is planned to have a collision energy of 500 GeV initially, and, if approved after the project has published its Technical Design Report, planned for 2012, could be completed in the late 2010s. A later upgrade to 1000...
.
For the HEP-Grid Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY)
DESY
The DESY is the biggest German research center for particle physics, with sites in Hamburg and Zeuthen....
, "German Electron Synchrotron") in Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
collaborates with eight German research facilities and universities and a set of associate partners.
InGrid
InGrid is a community project in the field of Grid computing in engineering sciences. InGrid aims to enable engineering projects for grid-based applications and allow for the common, efficient use of common compute and software resources. The flexible use of grid technologies will combine the competences in modeling, simulation and optimization.Five typical applications (foundry technologies, metal forming technologies, groundwater flow and transport, turbine simulation and fluid-structure interaction) are considered as showcases in order to cover the three central areas of computationally intensive engineering applications, that are coupled multi-scale problems, coupled multi-discipline problems, and distributed simulation-based optimization. In particular adaptive and scalable process models and Grid based runtime environments for these tasks are developed.
Engineering research is inherently application and industry oriented.
The support of virtual prototyping and the optimization of scientific engineering operational sequences is therefore an emphasis of the project.
The project management for InGrid is provided by the High Performance Computing Center (Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum) Stuttgart (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart
University of Stuttgart
The University of Stuttgart is a university located in Stuttgart, Germany. It was founded in 1829 and is organized in 10 faculties....
.
MediGRID
The joint project MediGRID unifies well known research institutes in the area of medicine, biomedical informatics and life sciences into a consortium. Numerous associated partners from industry, healthcare and research facilities ensure a broad representation of these communities.The main goal of MediGRID is the development of a Grid middleware integration platform enabling eScience services for biomedical life science. Therefore the consortium allocated the tasks in different modules. The four methodological modules (middleware, ontology, resource fusion and eScience) plan to incrementally develop and provide a Grid infrastructure while taking into account the need of the biomedical users. The user communities are represented in three research modules for biomedical informatics, image processing and clinical research.
SuGI
SuGI - Sustainable Grid Infrastructure - is a gap project of the German Grid Initiative. Its major task is to disseminate the knowledge of grid technology and to enhance its use. Thus, SuGI addresses all academic computing centers as well as enterprises, which still have not adopted grid technology. They will be supported in providing grid resources and services.During this project, research experiences gained in the D-Grid projects will be made available to these institutions. Thus, SuGI offers own training courses; attends to external courses, create video and audio recordings and provide these online to the D-Grid communities via a scaling training infrastructure (SuGI-Portal). Further on, SuGI develops training systems for grid middleware, contributes to a simplification of installation and servicing procedures, and works on the development and evaluation of legal and organizational structures.
TextGridTextGridTextGrid is a research group with the goal of supporting access to and the exchange of information in the humanities and social sciences with the help of modern information technology .-Background:...
While grid technologies have first been developed for the naturalNatural science
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...
and the life sciences
Life sciences
The life sciences comprise the fields of science that involve the scientific study of living organisms, like plants, animals, and human beings. While biology remains the centerpiece of the life sciences, technological advances in molecular biology and biotechnology have led to a burgeoning of...
, there are exciting opportunities for deploying grid technologies
Grid computing
Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...
and e-Science
E-Science
E-Science is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable distributed collaboration, such as the Access Grid...
concepts in other areas as well. TextGrid
TextGrid
TextGrid is a research group with the goal of supporting access to and the exchange of information in the humanities and social sciences with the help of modern information technology .-Background:...
is a grid project in the humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
, and thereby contributes to the emerging e-Humanities.
It aims to create a grid-based infrastructure for the collaborative editing
Collaborative editing
Collaborative editing is the practice of groups producing works together through individual contributions. Effective choices in group awareness, participation, and coordination are critical to successful collaborative writing outcomes. Most usually it is applied to textual documents or...
, annotation, analysis and publication of specialist texts for researchers in philology, linguistics, and related fields. In addition to providing a comprehensive toolset, the project establishes an open platform for other projects to plug into the TextGrid.
ValueGrids
ValueGrids develops an integrated concept and a set of tools for service level management in service value networks. This will enable providers of Software-as-a-Service solutions to utilize grid infrastructures and leverage the German national grid infrastructure.The ValueGrids project partners are: SAP AG
SAP AG
SAP AG is a German software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software...
(Coordinator), Conemis AG, IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH, University of Freiburg
University of Freiburg
The University of Freiburg , sometimes referred to in English as the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, is a public research university located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.The university was founded in 1457 by the Habsburg dynasty as the...
and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is a German academic research and education institution with university status resulting from a merger of the university and the research center of the city of Karlsruhe. The university, also known as Fridericiana, was founded in 1825...
.
WISENT
The e-Science project WISENT ("Wissensnetz Energiemeteorologie") has the aim to optimize the cooperation of scientific organizations in the field of Energy Meteorology employing Grid technologies. The main focus of scientific research within Energy Meteorology is the investigation of the influence of weather and climate on transformation, transport, and utilisation of energy.Funding
On the basis of the D-Grid Initiative more than 100 German research facilities are funded with about 20 billion Euros for a period of 3 years by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.External links
- D-Grid Initiative (official web site)
- AstroGrid-D (official web site)
- C3 Grid (official web site)
- GDI Grid (official web site)
- HEP-Grid (official web site)
- InGrid (official web site)
- MediGRID (official web site)
- SuGI (official web site)
- TextGrid (official web site)
- ValueGrids (official web site)
- WISENT (official web site)