Description

The activities related with Advanced Computing and e-Science at IFCA started around 2002 due to the requirements from different projects for support for simulation and data processing within large international collaborations, like CMS at LHC or ESA Planck mission. These distributed research teams require an ?enhanced? Science (or e-Science) framework, where they can interact through the network, sharing computing resources to support their larger needs for simulation, data storage and transfer, analysis, and collaborative work.

Our first step was to setup an e-infrastructure using an emerging technology: Grid computing. This technology allows in principle an integration of resources transparent to the final user, using digital certificates to access distributed resources in the authorization framework of what is known as a virtual organization. However the technology was not mature enough and motivated our initial research work in European projects like CrossGrid and DataGrid, where the first test-beds across whole Europe where setup. We discovered also that the support for parallel execution using the MPI protocol, and for interactive work, required further research that was the objective of the Interactive European Grid project that we proposed and coordinated together with another twelve first line European centres.

We extended our experience in Particle Physics and Astrophysics to new application domains: design of fusion reactor prototypes, modelling the flow in the atmosphere to understand pollution problems, simulation of the evolution of water resources or understanding the dynamic of waves in oceans up to the formation of tsunamis.

At the same time our group got involved in the supercomputing field, with the installation at our centre of a node in the Spanish Supercomputing Network, coordinated by the BSC centre in Barcelona. This fact contributed to our general interest on advanced computing techniques, including the mechanisms for their integration. We also played an important role on the creation of the Spanish e-Science Network in 2007, promoted an official master on Computing at our University, and built one of the largest research oriented CPD in Spain.

Currently our research interest continues with several projects:

• supporting the largest e-infrastructure in Europe, EGEE, where we contribute to the application porting including parallelism issues, advanced computing for Fusion (EUFORIA project),
• building also a mechanism of communication between the Grid and supercomputing worlds,
• and integration of remote instrumentation (DORII project).

Futhermore, we participate in the design of the European Grid, coordinate the National Grid Infrastructure project in Spain, and have deployed the largest Grid infrastructure, GRID-CSIC, aimed to support e-Science for CSIC researchers but also to find new ways for advanced computing including techniques like virtualization and large data transfer, the objectives of the latest two master-thesis presented in October 2008 by two of our young group members.

Keywords

e-Science, Distributed Computing, Grid, Supercomputing, High Performance Computing (HPC), parallelism, MPI, virtualization, clusters, large data transfer, cloud computing..