State of the Art: Europe & India

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.