IFJ PAN in BalticGrid Project

The BalticGrid project has been accepted within the Sixth Framework Programme of European Union. The goal is to extend the European Grid by integrating new partners from the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) in the European Grid research community. The collaboration of 10 institutions from Baltic States started at 1.11.2005 and is scheduled for 30 months.

The main target is to:

• develop and integrate the research and education computing and communication infrastructure in the Baltic States into the emerging European GRID infrastructure
• bring the knowledge in Grid technologies and use of Grids in the Baltic States
• engage the Baltic States in policy and standards setting activities

In recent years IFJ PAN has stimulated the development of a distributed computing infrastructure for research in Poland and the creation of the Polish Data Grid Consortium. The Institute was one of the main founders of the CYFRONET Academic Computer Centre which provides computing resources for the local research community and GRID community. IFJ PAN and CYFRONET closely collaborated in many diffrent research projects( CrossGrid, EGEE...).

IFJ PAN is involved in 3 activities of BalticGrid project.

• NA2 - Education, Training, Dissemination and Outreach

  As a leader of this activity IFJ PAN is responsible for planning, organizing and coordinating of all NA2 tasks.

  The objetives are twofold:

  • transfer Grid skills from the more experienced Project partners to new participants from the Baltic States so as to ensure the creation of a viable Grid community in these states.
  • spread awareness of the Project to a wider community of users and Grid specialists from the participating countries as well as from other EU Member States.
  
  

  The tasks of Education and Training will focus on integrating prospective users into the BG community as well as creating a trained group of Grid users and administrators in the Baltic States, which have heretofore had little experience with European Grid computing. The tasks of Dissemination and Outreach will focus on spreading knowledge on Grid computing to a wider community of users as well as on promoting the Project on the European stage.

• NA3 - Application Identification and Support

  The main objectives of this activity are:

  • identify application groups and communities that can benefit from the BG infrastructure and services
  • identify the needs of those group and communities and provide consulting services for application developers

  Key activities of IFJ PAN are:

  • Pilot Aplications - IFJ PAN has extensive experience with Grid-enabling High Energy Physics applications, most matured one within EGEE. HEP applications are critical for success of scientists from baltic countries participating in experiments at LHC or doing research in elementary particle physics.
    
    IFJ PAN selected two applications that may be used for validation of grid architecture and enables to create and improve aplication identification procedure.
    
    
    • Production of Monte Carlo samples
      It was developed for many years and extensively uses Grid technology. Implementation of this application will serve as a comprehensive test of the BaltiGrid infrastructure.
    • Statistical Data Analysis
      A relatively young application concerning the estimation of precision of complicated measurements. It requires large amount of computing time which is not available in the frame of traditional methods. The application needs to be ported to Grid from scratch.
  
  
  • Application Identification and Support - The staff of IFJ PAN has experience in developing to migrate legacy applications from various disciplines to Grid. This knowledge should be transfered to the Baltic States, where it will help to "gridify" applications in other sciences (like material sciences or bioinformatics)
    The main idea is to organize and initiate communication between application experts and Grid experts facilitating rapid Grid adaptation and deployment of applications through formation of an Application Expert Group. This group will analyse applications and identify required Grid technologies and will also provide consulting services to application developers. In particular the experience in the developement of the performance evaluation tools for Grid applications will enable users to improve performance of their applications.
    

• SA1 - Grid Operations

  The main objectives of SA1 are to set up and manage the core infrastructure of BalticGrid

  • management of the user and communication channels (e-mail lists etc)
  • set up and management of the communication channels and web site
  • Know-how shareing and expertise
  • monitoring and operational support
  • establish Core Grid services
  • provide support to installation of middleware
  • cenral Grid services for production in operation
  • support the instalation of middleware
  • operation of dependable high-quality help desk