European research network on foundations, software infrastructures and applications for large scale distributed, grid and peer-to-peer technologies

Informazioni relative al progetto

COREGRID

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: 4265

Progetto chiuso

Data di avvio 1 Settembre 2004

Data di completamento 31 Agosto 2008

Finanziato da

• Information Society Technologies: thematic priority under the specific programme "Integrating and strengthening the European research area" (2002-2006).

Costo totale Nessun dato

Contributo UE € 8 200 000,00

Coordinato da

GEIE ERCIM
France

Exploitable results

Grid computing steps out of the lab and into industry

The CoreGRID Network is funded by the European Commission within the European Union's Sixth Framework Programme for research and technological development. A grant of 8.2 million has been assigned to the project for a duration of four years starting from September 2004. CoreGRID comes under the framework of Europe's Information Society Technologies (IST) thematic priority. IST has defined Grid technologies as a crucial objective that will transform the European Union into the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world. By providing everyone with immense computing power and knowledge – currently unavailable to even the largest corporations and laboratories – Grids will improve the competitiveness of European industries and mark a new era of markets and services previously perceived as impossible to drive forward. The impact on our quality of life will be profound, allowing us to better monitor and model everything from global climate change to the way cars behave in collisions. In order to put Europe in front and make sure today's research addresses tomorrow's market needs, CoreGRID is committed to structuring European research by integrating a critical mass of expertise and promoting scientific and technological excellence within and beyond the Grid research community. Through this commitment, CoreGRID is helping Europe to take Grids out of research labs and into industry. This initiative marks a critical step in ensuring that Europe realises the benefits of the information society. Objectives & structure The primary objective of the CoreGRID Network of Excellence is to build solid methodological and technological foundations for Grid and peer-to-peer technologies, and to stay at the forefront of scientific excellence. This objective has been achieved by structuring integrated research activities carried out by experts in parallel and distributed systems, middleware, programming models, algorithms, tools and environments. This joint research contributed to realising the CoreGRID vision of a future Grid infrastructure: seamless integration of the existing Grid and other emerging architectures (such as peer-to-peer) using concepts and standards from the World Wide Web Consortium and other relevant standardisation bodies. To comply with this long-term objective, the CoreGRID Network runs a joint programme of activities (JPA). The JPA integrates and co-ordinates the activities of the major European research teams in the field of Grid and peer-to-peer technologies. Composed of well established researchers (161 permanent researchers and 164 PhD students) from 46 research centres and universities, the CoreGRID research teams bring high-level expertise in specific areas. They also influence their national Grid and peer-to-peer programmes, fostering better long-term integration. Main achievements of the Network After four years of existence, CoreGRID has carved out a place for itself in the international Grid research arena. It has become one of the largest research centres in Grid computing, encompassing a vast range of research topics such as knowledge and data management, programming models, middleware, resource management and scheduling, workflow, service infrastructures and P2P systems, just to cite a few. It has reached its ideal objective: to become the European Grid beacon. The main achievements are presented below: - Organisation of 60 meetings and 17 workshops, contributing to solving research challenges as described in the CoreGRID research roadmaps. - ?Setting up of a document repository allowing CoreGRID researchers to instantly access documents produced by the network. More than 3000 documents are stored in the repository. - ?Delivery of more than 450 joint technical papers accepted in peer-reviewed conferences, workshops and journals.??Publication of 176 CoreGRID technical reports and 5 white papers, co-authored by at least two different CoreGRID partners showing the level of integration among the CoreGRID community. - Publication of 11 CoreGRID books published by Springer. - The effective kick-off of several spin-off research projects or participation to projects, funded either by the European Commission within the 6th and the 7th Framework Programmes, or through national and/or regional initiatives - Establishing a database of publications by CoreGRID researchers in the area of Grid and peer-to-peer computing with around 1,050 references available today on the CoreGRID web site. - A researcher's database with more than 270 entries to allow any CoreGRID researcher to quickly identify the best experts on a given research topic related to Grid and P2P computing, thereby facilitating joint research activities. - Increased visibility of the Grid research community through the support of highlyreputed international conferences, such as EuroPar 2005, 2006 and 2007, HPDC 2006, IEEE conference on Grid Computing in 2006 and 2007 and events such as Grid@Work 2006 and 2007. CoreGRID also sponsored the Open Grid Forum as a silver member. - Opening up academic research agendas in order to identify business-oriented research priorities, leading to the spin-off of new CoreGRID activities, for example in service oriented architectures and systems. - Developing new ideas to anticipate technological trends and to promote commercially relevant and promising research. Conclusion and roadmap After four year of existence, CoreGRID has reshaped the research landscape in Grid computing in Europe. This has been done thanks to a large number of actions that encouraged and fostered collaboration between researchers. The CoreGRID management team has been driven by a unique goal: establish CoreGRID as a highly visible and sustainable research Lab in Grid computing, a more ambitious vision than just only a EU-funded project with a limited lifetime. The idea to set up CoreGRID came in 2002 and since that date, computing technologies have evolved and Grid is merging with some prominent concepts such as Service and Cloud computing. CoreGRID is playing an important role in the transition from Grid to Service computing. It already features a set of activities targeting service infrastructures, in particular in the area of Trust & Security, Service Level Agreement and Middleware Systems. However, the initial idea remains the same and our vision is still valid: how to set up a fully distributed, dynamically reconfigurable, scalable and autonomous infrastructure to provide location independent, pervasive, reliable, secure and efficient access to a coordinated set of services encapsulating and virtualising resources (computing power, storage, instruments, data, etc.) in order to generate knowledge. Grid computing has paved the way towards new computing systems that consider the Internet as a computing infrastructure per se. The Grid research community can be proud of what it has achieved over the last ten years: it has shown that a large scale distributed computing infrastructure can be implemented and deployed over the Internet to support the execution of e-Science applications and to serve a wide spectrum of users, thereby answering their needs for advances in their own research field.