Infrastructure

A series of European initiatives are involved in deploying and operating the European-wide e-Infrastructure. These initiatives cooperate with national programs at European and extra-European level. Eu-IndiaGrid supports and fosters collaboration between researchers from Europe and India in a wide range of scientific areas.

The ICT infrastructure for science is called e-Infrastructure and is the elementary building block of the e-Science. e-Infrastructure is an environment where resources  such as hardware, software and content  can be readily shared and accessed by the research community This will improve research processes and utlimately  lead to more effective research, boost international cooperation and increase international collaboration. This new research environment will see researchers from Delhi to Brussels and from Peking to New York, having shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities (including data, instruments, computing and communications), whether they are working in the context of their home institutions or in national or multinational scientific initiatives.

EUIndiaGrid is one of a number of global initiatives are working to make this vision a reality by connecting research communities around the globe. EU-IndiaGrid is a collaborative effort to integrate the EGEE and the Indian GARUDA Grid by bringing together over 500 multidisciplinary organisations to build a Grid-enabled e-Science Community; developing a sustained base of potential users from key science domains and business, bringing the advantages of Grid technology and boosting R&D innovation across Europe and India; mobilising a hardware infrastructure of about 1200 core processors and 50 TB of disk for the benefit of EU-India Grid applications.

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.