GARUDA

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.

The Department of Information Technology (DIT) has funded the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC[22]) to deploy the nation-wide computational grid ‘GARUDA’ which today connects 45 institutions cross 17 cities in its Proof of Concept (PoC) phase with an aim to bring “Grid” networked computing to research labs And industry. In pursuit of scientific and technological excellence, GARUDA PoC has also brought together the critical mass of well-established researchers.
To ensure progressive evolution and durable integration, GARUDA PoC is managed by C-DAC with the Grid monitoring station at Bangalore structured around complementary research areas that have been selected on the basis of their strategic importance, research challenges and the existing C-DAC expertise to build and engineer grid middleware and services.

The GARUDA network

The GARUDA network is a Layer 2/3 MPLS Virtual Private Network vvVPN] connecting selected institutions
at 10/100 Mbps with stringent quality and Service Level Agreements. The network has been contracted as a managed service with a peak capacity of 2.43 Gbps across 17 cities. This network is a pre-cursor to the next generation Gigabit speed nation-wide Wide Area Network with high performance computing resources and scientific instruments for seamless collaborative research and experiments. The PoC network was established at all the GARUDA partner institutes in close collaboration with ERNET who are responsible for the operation, maintenance and management of this network.

The GARUDA Communication Fabric

Objective
Provide an ultra-high speed multi services communication fabric connecting user organizations across 17 cities in the country
Provide seamless & high speed access to the compute, data & other resources on the Grid

Deliverables
High-speed Communication Fabric connecting 17 cities
Grid Management & Monitoring Centre
IP based Collaborative Environment among select centres

Features
Ethernet based High Bandwidth capacity
Scalable over entire geographic area
High levels of reliability
High security
Effective Network Management

Computational Resources

In this collaborative grid project, various resources such as high performance computing systems (HPC) and satellite based communication systems have been committed by different centers of C-DAC and GARUDA partners. It may be noted that since the resources are diverse in nature, one of the major challenges of GARUDA is to deploy appropriate tools and middleware to enable applications to run seamlessly across the grid.

Grid Management and Monitoring

A dedicated Grid monitoring and management centre at C-DAC, Bangalore helps in managing and monitoring all the components in the Grid. State-of-the-art display walls and advanced software like “Paryavekshanam” developed at C-DAC help in effectively monitoring the health and utilization of various components of the Grid. A mobile agent framework for monitoring the Grid resources and also for automatic update of software releases is being explored.

Prototype Applications

Applications of national importance that require aggregation of geographically distributed resources have
been prototyped in the PoC phase. Natural Disaster Management and Bio-informatics applications that are
characterized by intensive computing and data access requirements are being researched.
C-DAC in association with a partner research institution has analysed data from a network of sensors deployed over vast disaster-prone regions and uploaded to GARUDA as input to forecast models appropriate
for various stages of Natural Disaster Management. In operational deployment this will enable timely dissemination of disaster information to user agencies for effective mitigation and relief measures.
C-DAC’s Bio-informatics Resources & Applications Facility on their PARAM Supercomputing facility is accessible to the Bio-informatics community involved in insilico molecule identification and new drug discovery. The enormous amounts of data and the complexity of algorithms in bioinformatics demand tremendous computational cycles, necessitating effective use of grid resources beyond those available at any single location.

GARUDA Partners

Forty-five research and academic centres, including 36 Partner institutions, ERNET HQ and 8 centres of C-DAC are participating in GARUDA. Research has been initiated in Semantic Grid Services, Mobile Agents, Integrated Development Environments, Network Simulation and Grid File Systems. These initiatives are done both internally as well as in collaboration with partners. Moreover, C-DAC is also collaborating in the EU- India Grid project which will allow researchers and scientists across Europe and India to conduct simulation experiments on EGEE and GARUDA grids.