An Overview of the Hungarian Grid Projects

Péter Kacsuk

MTA SZTAKI

kacsuk@sztaki.hu

www.lpds.sztaki.hu

Since September 2000, six Grid projects have run or have been running in Hungary. All these projects were strongly interconnected and fertilised each other. The current talk will overview the aims and achievements of these projects and finally outlines the future of the Hungarian Grid systems based on this overview.

a. VISSZKI project

In the framework of the VISSZKI project we studied the Globus middleware and the Condor resource management system, which are considered as de facto standards in Grid computing. We evaluated these systems and investigated how they can be used in the construction of the Hungarian Grid system. The main target platform was a cluster of heterogeneous clusters and hence the results of this project significantly influenced the ClusterGrid and DemoGrid projects. The ClusterGrid project uses the Condor experiences while the DemoGrid project is built on top of the Globus experiments.

b. DemoGrid project

The DemoGrid project was focusing on the demonstration of the usage of Grid technology by four different application areas (human brain research, astrophysics, aerodynamics, and particle physics) that require the implementation of different kinds of algorithm classes in the Grid. Besides the applications, the project investigated some components of Grid middleware, like storage subsystem, Grid monitoring and Grid security. There was also a strong infrastructure building aspect of the project. ELTE and RMKI planned to build large PC-cluster and disk system for Grid usage.

c. SuperGrid project

Though the SuperGrid project is financed by the OM as an IKTA project, its main goal is to extend the supercomputing program of the Technical Board towards the Grid. The project aims at integrating the Hungarian supercomputers and large capacity clusters into a supercomputing Grid infrastructure and elaborating those software tools (Grid portal, accounting system, security system, high-level Grid program development environment) by which such an infrastructure can be easily used by the Hungarian academic community. A special application modelling the lifetime of the reactor of the Hungarian nuclear power station at Paks is employed to test and verify the new supercomputing Grid infrastructure.

d. ClusterGrid project

This project was initiated by NIIFI in association with the PC-laboratory tender of OM opened for Hungarian higher educational institutions. The aim of the project is to connect the PCs of the newly established 99 PC-laboratories (each containing 20 PCs and one server machine) into a high-performance and high-throughput Grid infrastructure that serves the research staff and students of the Hungarian higher educational institutions during the nights (from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m.) and weekends. The current prototype of the ClusterGrid is a homogeneous Grid system, which can be considered rather as a supercluster than a real heterogeneous Grid system. Nevertheless, its size (more than 2000 PCs) and the applied unique implementation approach make this system a significant Grid experiment all over Europe.

e. JiniGrid project

A Jini based Grid system is under investigation by a research group led by Zoltán Juhász at the University of Veszprém. The main concept of the project is to extend Jini with a Grid broker that can be used over the Internet. The extended Jini system was tested on a small experimental Grid system consisting of the computers of the University of Veszprém and SZTAKI. Based on the encouraging results obtained so far the University of Veszprém, SZTAKI, ELTE and Sun Microsystems Hungary Ltd. started a joint IKTA-5 project in January 2003. The goals of this project are to elaborate the detailed Jini based Grid system and to investigate its possible integration with the Web Services technology.

f. ChemistryGrid project

MTA SZTAKI developed a Grid system (called TotalGrid) by which the heterogeneous computing resources of an institution can be organised together and allocated on demand. The upper layers of TotalGrid (P-GRADE, PERL-GRID, GRM) are the research results of SZTAKI, and the lower layers are standard ones (Condor, PVM) accessible by anybody. The work of TotalGrid was demonstrated by SZTAKI and OMSZ by executing the MEANDER ultra-short weather forecast program package of OMSZ in a small Grid system. Based on these results SZTAKI, OMSZ, MTA KK and ELTE initiated a new IKTA-5 project in January 2003 with the aim of creating a specialised chemistry-Grid system and to apply this Grid for modelling various smog alarm strategies. This task will demonstrate the usability of Grid technology for collaborative research, as well.