INFN Grid

The INFN Grid project is the general container used by INFN — Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics — for its grid computing initiatives. The goal is to develop and deploy Grid middleware services which allow its various user communities, while taking part in worldwide experiments and projects, to transparently and securely share the computing and storage resources together with the applications and technical facilities, available in the different administrative domains of the various Institutions and geographical sites.

History

The INFN Grid project, approved in late 1999, has developed and deployed the first Italian Grid Infrastructure, based on [http://www.garr.it/ GARR] , the Italian research network. This is now a well known and largely used facility well integrated with various Grid infrastructures all over the world. It counts more than 30 sites, among the most important Italian universities and, although primarily focused on physics, it has been, since the beginning, open to other fields of research (bio-medicine, earth observation, etc.) and to industry. It represents a successful example of collaboration between physicists, software engineers, computer professionals, computer scientists and Italian industries.

With a grant received from the MIUR-FIRB funds (governmental funds for investment in fundamental research), for the "Grid.it" project, INFN with other National Research Institutions paved the way in 2002 for the development of a common [http://grid-it.cnaf.infn.it/ production grid] infrastructure supporting the Italian Research Area (IRA).

In collaboration with CERN, various European countries and some industries, INFN Grid launched in 2001 the largest FP5 European grid project, DataGrid, a milestone towards an infrastructure supporting the common European Research Area (ERA). With the same partners it furthermore promoted the [http://datatag.web.cern.ch/datatag/ DataTAG] project, which has provided interoperability solutions for the development of a World Grid for Science with US and Asian-Pacific areas. This work has been further extended by CERN's LHC Computing Grid Project (LCG), where INFN is one of the main contributing partners, which has deployed a worldwide grid service, integrating the capacity of scientific computing centers distributed throughout Europe, America and Asia to enable the analysis of the large amount of data produced by the new CERN accelerator starting in 2007.

With the CERN coordination and the collaboration of other institutes from almost all European countries, INFN has promoted the series of EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) FP6 project that has created a seamless European Grid infrastructure for the support of the European Research Area connected to the other major grid infrastructures in the world.

Since its beginning INFN Grid has been and is the national container for INFN to coordinate and integrate the internal efforts for the development of the grid middleware, the deployment and operation of the national grid infrastructure and the dissemination activities towards industries and the society, with the contribution to several European and International Grid projects and to the GGF standardization activities.

National Projects

INFN Grid has a central role in Grid development and deployment activities in Italy, from sharing its infrastructure and know-how, to establishing platforms for further development of Grid applications specifically targeted to industrial and commercial user communities, and to creating dissemination tools where anyone can access the Grid and experience its functionalities firsthand.Currently, the main efforts are in the following projects (ordered by expiration date—infinity if not set, descending):

Past projects include:

* FIRB's [http://www.grid.it Grid IT] (2002-2004).

International Projects

INFN Grid is a key contributor in a number of large international projects. In particular, the current projects INFN Grid is involved in are (ordered by expiration date—infinity if not set, descending):

Past projects include:

* GridCC, "Grid enabled Remote Instrumentation with Distributed Control and Computation" (2005-2007).
* EGEE, "Enabling Grids for E-sciencE" (2004-2006).
* [http://eu-datagrid.web.cern.ch/eu%2Ddatagrid/ EDG] , "European Data Grid" (2001-2004).
* [http://datatag.web.cern.ch/datatag/ DATATAG] (2001-2003).

Internal Development Projects

This is a list of the main development projects inside the INFN Grid project (in alphabetical order):
* [http://grid.pd.infn.it/cemon/field.php CEMon] . This service is responsible for providing information coming from the Computing Element (CE).
* [http://www.pi.infn.it/constanza/ CONStanza] . The project aims at developing a Replica Consistency Service that maintains consistency of writable replicated data and is general enough to cater for the requirements of most applications and middleware services in a Grid environment.
* [http://grid.pd.infn.it/cream/field.php CREAM] . The "Computing Resource Execution And Management Service" is a simple, lightweight service for job management operation at the Computing Element (CE) level.
* [http://egee-jra1-wm.mi.infn.it/egee-jra1-wm/org.glite.dgas.shtml DGAS] . The DGAS accounting service accumulates information about the usage of Grid resources by the users and by groups of users, including Virtual Organizations as groups of users.
* [http://glueschema.forge.cnaf.infn.it/ GLUE Schema] . This schema is an abstract modeling for Grid resources and mapping to concrete schemes that can be used in Grid Information Services.
* [https://genius.ct.infn.it/ genius] . A Grid portal.
* [https://gilda.ct.infn.it/ GILDA] . "Grid INFN Laboratory for Dissemination Activities".
* [https://twiki.cnaf.infn.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/GPBox/WebHome G-PBox] . A gLite component aiming to solve the tasks of policy management in a production Grid environment.
* [http://grid2win.gilda-forge.ct.infn.it/new/index.php Grid2Win] . This project aims at creating a gLite User Interface (UI) and a gLite Computing Element (CE) running on Microsoft Windows.
* [http://gridice.forge.cnaf.infn.it/ GriDICE] . This is a distributed monitoring tool designed for Grid systems. It promotes the adoption of de-facto standard Grid Information Service interfaces, protocols and data models.
* [http://storm.forge.cnaf.infn.it/doku.php StoRM] . A storage resource manager for disk based storage systems.
* [https://twiki.cnaf.infn.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/VOMS/WebHome VOMS] . "Virtual Organization Membership Service".
* [http://egee-jra1-wm.mi.infn.it/egee-jra1-wm/wms.shtml WMS] . The "Workload Management System" comprises a set of Grid middleware components responsible for the distribution and management of tasks across Grid resources, in such a way that applications are conveniently, efficiently and effectively executed.

Involvement in Nuclear Physics Experiments

INFN Grid is involved in the large international physics experiments centered around CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC): ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. In support of these experiments, which will generate huge amounts of data and require intensive computing power, the INFN Grid infrastructure is being continually monitored, tested, challenged, and enhanced.

[http://infn-ecgi.pi.infn.it/index.html ECGI] is a workgroup representing the Italian contribution to the development of the EGEE/LCG Grid Middleware in terms of testing the new gLite software and providing relevant user documentation.

External links

* INFN's official [http://www.infn.it Web site] .
* INFN Grid's [http://grid.infn.it Web site] .
* INFN Production Grid's [http://grid-it.cnaf.infn.it Web site] .
* The Italian Grid Infrastructure (IGI)'s [http://www.italiangrid.org/ Web site] .
* The European Grid Initiative (EGI)'s [http://web.eu-egi.org/ Web site] .
* LCG's [http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/ Web site] .
* LHC's [http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/Public/ ALICE] experiment.
* LHC's [http://atlas.ch/ ATLAS] experiment.
* LHC's [http://cms.cern.ch/ CMS] experiment.
* LHC's [http://lhcb.web.cern.ch/lhcb/ LHCb] experiment.