Project Leader: Prof. Dr. András Benczúr
Duration: 2001-2002
News: Report of the
third stage
Recently it became a word wide trend among the scientific and research institutes to connect their clusters and supercomputers using high-speed network connections: unifiying their resources in the GRID. This project intends to strengthen this progress in Hungary as well by satisfying the following goals:
To study, apply and develop general GRID architecture.
There are mature tools that successfully address the communication and data storage problems of supercomputers and clusters on local or site-wide networks, but extending these solutions to connect geographically widespread, heterogeneous networks requires different approaches in some aspects. A meta-computing environment is to be built on the top of custom computing environments. The Globus Toolkit or a similar system will be the basis of this environment.
To study GRID subsystems and enhance them to meet the requirements of pilot applications.
In a couple of years, applications will require storage capacity of petabyte order. Storage solutions must be scalable to this order without change in the basic technology. The following forms of storage will be evaluated:
Monitoring is essential for developing effective applications, debugging and the effective use of the GRID resources.
Existing security solutions are not applicable in widespread, heterogeneous systems, either because of their technological limitations or because of high costs. We believe that an adequate infrastructure based on open source software can be implemented.
To develop and run pilot applications.
The following types of applications will be considered, to ensure the system's applicability on large variety of problems.
Expand storage subsystem to 5 terabyte.
Expand CPU farms to 300 processors.
Improve local networks and use NIIF (National Information Infrastructure Development Program) network for inter-site communication.