Italian Grid Infrastructure

The INFN Grid project was an initiative of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) —Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics—for grid computing. Its goal was to develop and deploy grid middleware services to allow INFN's user communities to transparently and securely share the computing and storage resources together with applications and technical facilities for scientific collaborations.

With the beginning of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) project in 2010, the activities of INFN Grid were consolidated into the Italian Grid Infrastructure (IGI) which operates as a European joint research unit (JRU) formally supported by the Italian Ministry for University and Research (MIUR) and the European Commission.

History

The INFN Grid project, approved in late 1999, developed and deployed the first Italian Grid Infrastructure. Based on GARR, the Italian national research and education network, it became integrated with other grid infrastructures. It included more than 30 sites, including Italian universities and, although primarily focused on physics, was open to other fields of research (bio-medicine, earth observation, etc.) and to industry.

With a grant received from MIUR-FIRB funds (governmental funds for investment in fundamental research) for the Grid.it project, INFN with other national research institutions led to the 2002 development of a production grid infrastructure supporting Italian research called Grid.it.

In collaboration with CERN, other European countries and industries, in 2001 INFN Grid launched the largest FP5 European grid project, DataGrid, for an infrastructure supporting the European research area (ERA). With the same partners it promoted the Data TransAtlantic Grid (DataTAG) project, which provided interoperability with a world grid for science with US and Asian-Pacific areas from 2001 through 2003.

The Experiment Computing Grid Integration working group represented the Italian contribution to the development of middleware by testing the gLite software and providing user documentation.

International projects

INFN Grid contributed to:

International projects

Name	Description	Duration/Start Date	Notes
EGI	European Grid Infrastructure	2010–2014	Funded by the EU under the 7th Framework Programme
EMI	European Middleware Initiative	2010–2013	Funded by the EU under the 7th Framework Programme
OSIRIS	Open and Sustainable ICT Research Infrastructure Strategy	2010–2012	Funded by the EU under the 7th Framework Programme
LCG	The LHC Computing Grid	2004–present	-
EGEE III	Enabling Grids for E-sciencE III	2008–2010	Funded by the EU under the 7th Framework Programme
EGI_DS	The European Grid Initiative Design Study	2007–2009	Funded by the EU under the 7th Framework Programme
BioinfoGRID	Bioinformatics Grid Applications for life sciences	2006–2008	-
CoreGRID	-	2004–2008	-
EGEE II	Enabling Grids for E-sciencE II	2006–2008	Funded by the EU under the 6th Framework Programme
ETICS	eInfrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software	2006–2008	Funded by the EU under the 6th Framework Programme
EUMEDGRID	European Mediterranean Grid	2006–2008	Funded by the EU under the 6th Framework Programme
OMII-Europe	The Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute Europe	2006–2008	Funded by the EU under the 6th Framework Programme
EGEE	Enabling Grids for E-sciencE	2004–2006	Funded by the EU. Contract number INFSO-RI-508833
CYCLOPS	-	-	-
NOBEL	-	-	-
Eela	E-infrastructure shared between Europe and Latin America	-	-
EUChinaGRID	-	-	-
EUIndiaGRID	-	-	-

Older projects include:

• GridCC, Grid enabled Remote Instrumentation with Distributed Control and Computation (2005–2007).
• EDG , European Data Grid (2001–2004).

Software development

Some software components developed within the INFN Grid project (in alphabetical order):

• CEMon. This service is responsible for providing information coming from the computing element (CE).
• CONStanza. A replica consistency service that maintains consistency of writable replicated data.
• CREAM. The Computing Resource Execution And Management Service for job management operation at the computing element (CE) level.
• 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.
• GLUE Schema. This schema is an abstract modeling for Grid resources and mapping to concrete schemes that can be used in grid Information Services.
• genius. A Grid portal.
• GILDA. Grid INFN Laboratory for Dissemination Activities.
• G-PBox. A gLite component aiming to solve the tasks of policy management in a production Grid environment.
• Grid2Win. This project aims at creating a gLite User Interface (UI) and a gLite Computing Element (CE) running on Microsoft Windows.
• 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.
• StoRM. A storage resource manager for disk based storage systems.
• VOMS. Virtual Organization Membership Service.
• WMS. The Workload Management System, middleware for distribution and management of tasks across Grid resources.

External links

• IGI (The Italian Grid Infrastructure) web site.