State of the Art: Europe & India

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09 November 2009

Europe and India are collaborating to exploit the vast potential of global eScience infrastructures through Grid computing in order to address global challenges such as climate warming and disease.

 

Europe has a long-term, coordinated and shared Grid R&D vision, mission, strategy, roadmap and funding, driven by the European Commission's Framework Programmes. Europe has embraced the notion of a “Worldwide Grid for Research” as expressed in the e- Infrastructure's Reflection Group White Paper . For Europe, the “Worldwide Grid” will form the basis of the Information and Knowledge Society by providing or enabling many diverse elements: virtual collaborative environments; tools for education and research; planning and simulation tools for complex problem solving; virtual environments for medical treatment; storage and analysis of high-resolution data, pictures and video; providing access to massive scientific databases for disciplines from bio-informatics and bio-chemistry to meteorology, physics and astronomy; and non-scientific databases for cultural heritage, museum collections and many more.
Similarly in India, GARUDA, the National Grid Initiative of India (http://www.garudaindia.in/) is a collaboration of scientific and technological researchers on a nationwide grid comprising of computational nodes, storage devices and scientific instruments. It aims to provide the technological advances required to enable data and compute intensive science for the 21st century. GARUDA has now transitioned from the Proof of Concept phase (which ERNET initiated together with C-DAC) to the Foundation Phase in April 2008. The establishment of Indian Grid Certification Authority (IGCA), (http://ca.garudaindia.in) for the first time in India by CDAC in November 2008 has allowed full access to worldwide grids for Indian Researchers and represented a landmark in this domain. This important milestone was achieved through strong cooperation with the FP6-EU-IndiaGrid.

The remarkable achievements in recent years have meant that joint collaboration and enthusiasm is high from both Europe and from India and this momentum needs to be reinforced over the next twenty-four months.  INFN and  its strong 13 consortium of Indian and European EU-IndiaGrid2 partners are actively involved with leading roles in this process and are in a favourable position to drive forward these objectives in 2010 -2011.

European Grid Context

The European scenario is represented by a number of initiatives which are vital to the success of EU-IndiaGrid2:

  1. EGEE-III project (http://www.eu-egee.org/), the largest and most important EU funded Grid infrastructure project, now has entered to its third phase. EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-SciencE) is a collaborative effort among 139 institutions in 32 countries, organised in 13 ‘Federations’. The associated Grid production infrastructure is comprised of more than 280 sites across 50 countries offering around 80,000 CPUs, and more than 20 Petabytes of storage space. The infrastructure is available to users on 24/7 basis, achieving a sustained workload of approximately 250,000 jobs/day (data as of Feb 2009).
  2. EGI_DS -The European Grid Initiative (EGI), (http://web.eu-egi.eu/) aims at establishing a sustainable grid infrastructure in Europe.  Driven by the needs and requirements of the research community, it is expected to enable the next leap in research infrastructures, thereby supporting collaborative scientific discoveries in the European Research Area (ERA). The main foundations of EGI are the National Grid Initiatives (NGI), which operate the grid infrastructures in each country. EGI will link existing NGIs and will support the setup and initiation of new NGIs. The EGI Organisation starts its operations in spring 2010, by the end of EGEE-III.
  3. GÉANT The crucial enabling infrastructure for the current research Grid projects is GÉANT (http://www.geant2.net/), the world's most powerful research network, which links more than 3000 research institutions across Europe. GÉANT2, its successor, launched in 2004, connects 34 countries through 30 national research and education networks (NRENs), using multiple 10Gbps links. Connecting Europe to research and education networks of countries across the globe remains a priority.

The Indian Grid Context

The GARUDA project, highlighted above, is coordinated by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) and its network infrastructures was designed, set-up and operated by ERNET (Indian Education & Research Network, (http://www.eis.ernet.in/index.htm). Both CDAC and ERNET are partners in EU-IndiaGrid2 project and most EU-IndiaGrid Indian partners are stakeholders in the GARUDA project.

The creation of the National Knowledge Network (NKN) vital to India’s development is being implemented under the able leadership of Dr. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India. It will provide transport to all the networks in India by a multi-gigabit, low-latency, OFC-based backbone. The main design consideration for NKN is to create an infrastructure that can scale and adapt to future requirements. The project’s ultimate aim is to unite stakeholders in science, technology, higher education, R&D and e-governance using network speeds of tens of gigabits per second coupled with extremely low latencies. The NKN will eventually cover over 1000 institutions directly with funding of 1000 million US dollars. The initial phase of NKN, with 15 Core locations and about 57 institutes covering leading national R&D labs and educational institutes, is operational since December 2008. It is expected to connect more than 100 institutes by the end of March 2009. EU-IndiaGrid2 Indian partners have an active role in NKN with leading responsibilities in the Committee for High Performance and Grid Computing. Find out more about the NKN

This national framework is complemented by the transition to phase III of the TransEurasia Information Network (TEIN3) (http://www.tein3.net) which sees, for the first time the participation of India (represented by ERNET and the Department of Information Technology) to the feasibility study. NKN and TEIN3 set the premises for important developments and significant strengthening of the cooperation between Europe and India in the domain of international connectivity. This was highlighted in the context of dedicated meetings held recently in January 2009, with participation of representatives from EU-IndiaGrid project, DANTE, the European Commission and the Indian Government.