Academic Supercomputing in Europe

European programmes and initiatives

This chapter describes the European initiatives and programmes that are either aimed at high-performance computing and networking or which are related to these aspects. Of the many currently ongoing grid projects only those that include the establishment of a computational infrastructure are mentioned. Furthermore, this chapter shortly introduces the agencies involved.

European Union - Policy and R&D programmes

EU’s policy

EU's policy is directed to attain and maintain competitiveness for the European industry. The R&D activities undertaken hereto are structured in so called Framework Programmes each of which spans a period of 4 years.

The EU sees national research and education infrastructures and facilities as the responsibility of the national authorities. EU's contribution is directed to stimulate the development of these infrastructures and to link the activities undertaken for that purpose.

EU’s Sixth Framework Programme

The 6th Framework Programme (FP6) covers the period 2002-2006 and has a budget of €17.883 billion.
A major aim of FP6 is to realise a European Research Area (ERA) which can compete effectively with the research efforts of the USA and Japan.
FP6 is divided into three Specific Programmes:

• Focusing and integrating Community research;
• Structuring the ERA;
• Strengthening the foundations of the ERA.

The first programme has 7 thematic priorities. The theme "Information Society Technologies (IST)" (budget €3.984 billion) has a HPCN related component. A strategic priority of this theme is "Grid-based systems for Complex Problem Solving" that focuses on computing and information grids and middleware to make use of large-scale highly distributed computing and storage resources and to develop scalable, dependable and secure platforms. In the budget of this theme €110 million are for the further development of GÉANT and grid.

The second Specific Programme has four activity areas. One of them, "Research infrastructures" (budget €715 million), promotes the development of a fabric of research infrastructures of the highest quality and performance in Europe. These include high-speed communications networks (e.g. GÉANT) and networks of computing facilities (e.g. Grids).

The third Specific Programme has a budget of €347 milllion of which €218 million will be used for the further development of GÉANT and grid.

One of the goals of FP6 is to create a pan-European grid-based infrastructure to support the ERA. Therefore (research on) grid technology and its applications are major activities.

http://www.cordis.lu/fp6/

EU’s Seventh Framework Programme

The 7th Framework Programme (FP7), as proposed by the EC in April 2005, will span the period 2007-2013 with a mid-term review not later than 2010. The proposed budget is €72.7 billion. This substantial raise compared to FP6 is in accordance with the EU objective of increasing the funding for research to 3% of the EU GDP between now and 2010 and doubling the funding for this policy area. However, an agreement on the EU long-term budget has not yet been reached and it is almost sure that the proposed budget for FP7 will be substantially reduced (with 35–40%).
The implementation of the ERA will remain an important goal of FP7. This encompasses the support, design, development and use of key research infrastructures of European dimension. A component hereof is the upgrade of the European high-speed research networking and HPC infrastructure.
The proposed thematic priorities include space research and security and continue the support of research in life sciences, nanotechnology and chemicals.
Procedures within FP7 will be made clearer and simpler.
A European Research Council (ERC) is likely to be put in place. Its main task will be to fund, on a very strong competitive basis, top class basic and strategic research in all fields of science, including engineering.

http://www.cordis.lu/era/fp7.htm

European Union - Research Infrastructure organisations

Next a description is given of EU organisations primarily involved in setting up policies for high-end (HPCN) research infrastructures.

eIRG

The eInfrastructure Reflection Group (eIRG) co-ordinates on a high European level the introduction of a (grid based) infrastructure for e-Science.
The main objective of the eIRG is to support on the political, advisory and monitoring level, the creation of a policy and administrative framework for the easy and cost-effective shared use of electronic resources in Europe (focusing on Grid-computing, data storage, and networking resources) across technological, administrative and national domains.

http://www.e-irg.org/

ESFRI

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) was launched in April 2002. Its members are representatives of the 25 EU member states, the 8 associated countries (since August 2004) and a representative of the European Commission. The members, who are decision-makers on research infrastructures policy in their country, are appointed by the national ministers in charge of research.

ESFRI supports a coherent approach to policy-making on research infrastructures in Europe and will act as an incubator for international initiatives.

In April 2005 ESFRI presented to the European Commission a first list of opportunities for new large scale infrastructures. One of the projects listed is HPCEUR, a European Petaflop HPC facility.

ESFRI is preparing a roadmap for new research infrastructures of pan-European interest for the next 10-20 years.

http://www.cordis.lu/era/esfri_home.htm

EU-funded GRID projects

Here a small selection is given of the EU-funded Grid projects that are in progress or have been finished recently. A detailed overview can be found via the IST pages of the EU website.

http://www.cordis.lu/ist/home.html

• CoreGRID

  CoreGRID is a European "Network of Excellence" that aims to strengthen and advance scientific and technological excellence in the area of Grid and P2P technologies. The joint programme of the 42 participating institutions is structured around six research areas. This 4-year programme started in September 2004 and has received a EU grant of €8.2 million.

  http://www.coregrid.net/

• CrossGrid

  This 3-year IST-funded project started in March 2002 and has deployed a distributed computing infrastructure allowing access to high-end computational resources across Europe. This environment has been used to develop interactive parallel applications addressing large-scale problems in several research fields. The project, in which 21 partners from 11 European countries participated, was co-ordinated by Cyfronet (Cracow, Poland). The project costs were € 6.7 million. EU funds € 4.86 million.

  http://www.eu-crossgrid.org/

• DEISA

  DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications) is a consortium of national supercomputing centres in Europe that are jointly building and operating a distributed terascale supercomputing facility using grid technologies. The principal partners are: CINECA (Italy), CSC (Finland), ECMWF (UK), EPCC (UK), FZJ (Germany), IDRIS (France), RZG (Germany), SARA (the Netherlands), LRZ (Germany), HLRS (Germany) and BSC (Spain).
  DEISA provides now an AIX super-cluster consisting of 5 IBM Power4 platforms: FZJ (1312 processors), IDRIS (1024 processors), RZG (896 processors), CINECA (512 processors) and CSC (512 processors). The aggregate peak computing capacity is 25 Tflop/s.
  In a second phase (from 3Q05 on) DEISA will provide a federation of heterogeneous resources consisting of the AIX super-cluster and key systems of the other partner sites.
  DEISA uses an internal network with reserved bandwidth and 1 Gbps connections provided by GEANT and the NRENs to connect the supercomputers.
  The project has received a grant from the FP6 program for the period May 2004 until April 2009.

  www.deisa.org

• EGEE

  The Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe (EGEE) project wants to build a seamless European Grid infrastructure for the support of the ERA by integrating current grid efforts from across Europe. EGEE focuses on three core areas:

  • to build a consistent, robust and secure Grid network;
  • to continuously improve and maintain the middleware in order to deliver a reliable service to users;
  • to attract new users and ensure they receive the high standard of training and support they need.

  The EGEE project has 70 partners from 27 countries. The EGEE Grid will be built on GÉANT. The project receives over € 30 million funding from the EU.

  http://public.eu-egee.org

• Evergrow

  The 4-year IST-project EVERGROW started in January 2004 and aims to lead the way to a completely new Internet in a few decades. More than 20 universities and institutes, and four corporations participate. The project is co-ordinated by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) in Kista, Sweden.

  http://public.evergrow.org

• GRIDLAB

  This 3-year IST-funded project started in January 2002. It has developed a Grid Application Toolkit enabling applications to make innovative use of global computing resources. The grid-enabled applications were tested on testbeds constructed by linking a heterogeneous collection of supercomputers and other resources spanning Europe and the US. The project is led by PSNC (Poznan, Poland). The other participants are 8 European academic institutions (from the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK), 3 US universities and two computer manufacturers. The project costs are ~ € 6 million of which the EU funds ~€ 5 million.

  http://www.gridlab.org

• LCG

  The goal of the Large Hadron Collider Computer Grid (LCG) project is to meet the computing needs of the LHC by integrating the capacity of scientific computing centres spread across Europe, America and Asia into a virtual computing organisation. In October 2004 the level of deployement of LGC was: 85 sites, 8616 processors, 96 TB storage.

  http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/

EU-programmes, projects and activities with an HPCN component

• ENACTS

  The European Network for Advanced Computing Technology for Science is a co-operation of HPC centres. The participants are: CECAM (France), CESCA-CEPBA (Spain), CINECA (Italy), CNR (Italy), CSC (Finland), CSCS (Switzerland), EPCC (UK), FORTH-IESL (Greece), ICCC (Czech Republic), NSC (Sweden), Parallab (Norway), PSNC (Poland), TCD (Ireland) and UNI·C (Denmark). ENACTS officially closed on 31 December 2004.
  ENACTS has carried out several studies on key enabling technologies. These reports can be found on:

  http://www.enacts.org

• HPC-Europa

  The Transnational Access activity of the HPC-Europa consortium enables researchers of eligible countries to visit an HPC-centre to carry out collaborative research and to gain access to powerful HPC facilities. The centres participating in this activity are: CEPBA/CESCA (Spain), CINECA (Italy), EPCC (UK), HLRS (Germany), IDRS (France) and SARA (the Netherlands).
  Besides the access activity the consortium is engaged in networking and research activities. The other consortium partners are CASPUR (Italy), NTUA (Greece), Parallab (Norway), PSNC (Poland) and TCD (Ireland).
  The project started in January 2004 and is funded for 4 years.

  http://www.hpc-europa.org

Supranational consortia

European organisations that use supercomputers or that are involved in HPCN related activities are briefly described in this subsection.

Supranational co-operations

• ARCADE

  This consortium of national bodies involved in high-end computing infrastructures was founded in 1995 and provides an European platform for the exchange of knowledge and information on high-end computing policies and infrastructures.

  http://www.arcade-eu.org

• ERCIM

  The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics is an organisation dedicated to the advancement of European R&D in the areas of Information Technology and Applied Mathematics. The 18 participants are the national research centres: AARIT (Austria), CCLRC (UK), CNR (Italy), CRCIM (Czech Republic), CWI (The Netherlands), FhG (Germany), FNR (Luxembourg), FNRS&FWO (Belgium), FORTH (Greece), INRIA (France), NTNU (Norway), SARIT (Switzerland), SICS (Sweden), SpaRCIM (Spain), SRCIM (Slovak Republic), SZTAKI (Hungary), TCD (Ireland) and VTT (Finland).

  http://www.ercim.org

• EREA

  The members of the Association of European Research Establishments in Aeronautics are CIRA (Italy), DERA (UK), DLR (Germany), FOI (Sweden), INTA (Spain), NLR (The Netherlands) and ONERA (France). All these organisations are active users of HPCN technology.

  http://www.erea.org

Supranational Grid initiatives

• Central-European Grid Consortium (CEGC)

  CEGC, established in January 2003, is an open consortium, primarily for Central-European countries. The main goal is:

  • to co-ordinate grid infrastructures of partner countries;
  • to jointly develop a grid infrastructure;
  • to jointly participate in the EU FP6 grid projects as well in other international grid projects.

  The 6 partner countries are: Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

  http://www.cyfronet.krakow.pl/~yemosurs/

• GaiaGrid

  The GaiaGrid is being built with the goal of accessing and processing the astronometic information that will be gathered by the Gaia mission. GaiaGrid consists of a growing network of clusters. Currently it comprises resources at ESTEC (The Netherlands), ARI (Germany), CESCA (Spain), Dutch Space (The Netherlands), ESAC (Spain), ESRIN (Italy), INFN (Italy) and ULB (Belgium).

  http://gaiagrid.esa.int

• Nordic Grid Consortium (NGC)

  This consortium was founded in April 2002 by CSC (Finland), Parallab (Norway) and PDC (Sweden) to promote Nordic grid projects by establishing a laboratory for grid middleware and application development. The resources consist of 13 clusters of academic organisations in the participating countries.

  http://www.nordicgrid.org

• Nordic DataGrid Facility

  The Research Councils in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden are considering a major investment in 2005 in a Nordic DataGrid Facility that will serve present and future multidisciplinary computational needs. The preparatory project NDGF will result early 2005 in a proposal. The Nordic Research Councils together allocated k€ 544 annually for the years 2003 and 2004.

• NorduGrid

  The Nordic Testbed for Wide Area Computing project and Data Handling (NorduGrid) started in 2001 as part of the Nordunet2 programme. It has established a inter-Nordic GRID testbed to prepare for the future requirements of the CERN LHC project. Universities in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden participate in this project. NorduGrid is also a testbed for the EDG project.

  http://www.nordugrid.org

• North European Grid

  The North European Grid (NEG) consortium clusters activities and interests in the field of grids. The consortium partners are from Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Other Northern European countries may join at a later stage. NEG participates as a consortium in the EGEE project.

  http://www.northeuropeangrid.org

• SEE-GRID

  The South Eastern European Grid-enabled eInfrastructure Development project aims to develop a regional large-scale grid infrastructure in South East Europe. The members of the consortium are: GRNET (Greece, co-ordinator), INIMA (Albania), IPP-BAS (Bulgaria), UKIM (FYR of Macedonia), UOB (Serbia-Montenegro), BIHARNET (Bosnia-Herzegovina), ICI (Romania), TUBITAK (Turkey), SZTAKI (Hungary), RBI (Croatia) and CERN. SEE-GRID co-operates with EGEE. The project started officially on May, 1st, 2004 and has received funding from FP6.

  http://www.see-grid.org

Go on with networking facilities