Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications

Formation	2002
Purpose	Research Network
Region served	Europe

Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) was a consortium of major national supercomputing centres in Europe. Initiated in 2002, it became a European Union funded supercomputer project. The consortium of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries promoted pan-European research on European high-performance computing systems by creating a European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing.

History

The DEISA project started as DEISA1 in 2002 developing and supporting a pan-European distributed high performance computing infrastructure. The initial project was funded by the European Commission in the sixth of the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development (FP6) from 2004 through 2008. The funding continued for the follow-up project DEISA2 in the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) through 2011.

The DEISA infrastructure coupled eleven national supercomputing centres with a dedicated (mostly 10 Gbit/s) network connection provided by GÉANT2 on the European level and the national research and education networks (NRENs).

DEISA was the first initiative to overcome the fragmentation of supercomputing resources in Europe. Part of the national supercomputing resources were provided for most challenging computational projects from all over Europe, providing access to the most advanced and most suitable supercomputer architectures available, for positively reviewed projects. Through DECI, the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative, not only computing resources, but also advanced application enabling was provided.

Consortium

There were 11 principal partners and four associate partners.

Principal partners were:

• Max Planck Gesellschaft, Germany
• Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany
• Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
• CINECA, Italy
• CSC, Scientific Computing Ltd, Finland
• European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, United Kingdom
• Jülich Research Centre, Germany
• Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique (CNRS), France
• Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, United Kingdom
• High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), University of Stuttgart, Germany

Associate partners were:

• CEA, Computing Complex, Bruyères-le-Châtel, France
• JSCC, Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
• Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Manno, Switzerland
• The Royal Institute of Technologies - Center for Parallel Computers, (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden

In 2011 services were taken over by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE).

DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative - DECI

The DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI) was launched in 2005 to enhance DEISA's impact on science and technology. Multi-national proposals were especially encouraged. DEISA carried out 6 DECI projects until 2010. After the end of DEISA, DECI was continued by PRACE as Tier-1 level services under the name of "Distributed European Computing Initiative".Then the PRACE Tier-0 level services

provided the leading edge of supercomputing in Europe.

The DEISA TeraGrid Collaboration

DEISA was the European counterpart of the US NSF funded TeraGrid project. In a collaborative effort, a supercomputing hyper-grid spanning two continents was created in 2005 to move a step towards interoperability of leading grids. A dedicated network connection was established between DEISA, the leading European supercomputing grid, and TeraGrid, the leading American supercomputing grid. Both grids had adopted the approach of establishing a common, high performance global file system, the wide-area version of IBM's GPFS. Teragrid's approach was based on a single site server solution under Linux, hosted by San Diego Supercomputer Centre, DEISA's approach was a multi-site server solution, with servers in France, Germany and Italy. These two grid-internal global file systems were interconnected over a dedicated, trusted network connection. During the Supercomputing Conference 2005, grand challenge applications were carried out both within DEISA and within TeraGrid, and results were written transparently to the combined global file system with physically distributed locations of the involved disk systems.

DEISA Publications

DEISA published a brochure in 2008 and DEISA Digests in 2008, 2010 and 2011.

DEISA Brochure: Advancing Science in Europe

DEISA Digest 2008: Benefits of Supercomputing (ISBN 978-952-5520-33-0)

DEISA Digest 2010: Extreme computing in Europe (ISBN 978-952-5520-40-8)

DEISA Digest 2011: Extreme computing in Europe (ISBN 978-952-5520-33-0

DEISA Benchmark Suite

DEISA produced a benchmark suite to help computer scientists assess the performance of parallel supercomputer systems. The benchmark comprises a number of real applications codes taken from a wide range of scientific disciplines. A structured framework allows compilation, execution and analysis to be configured and carried out via standard input files.

The codes were chosen as representative of the scientific projects performed on the DEISA supercomputers. The codes and associated datasets were selected for benchmarking systems with peak performances ranging up to hundreds of teraflops, machines which are more powerful than a desktop personal computer by factors of tens of thousands.

The suite contained codes relevant to astrophysics, fluid dynamics, climate modelling, biosciences, materials science, fusion power and fundamental particle physics. It has been run by DEISA on a range of its own supercomputers and records of the results are kept for comparison. The DEISA benchmark was used by the EU-funded PRACE project as a starting point for their investigations of benchmarks for the next generation of petaflop supercomputers.