Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid, a nationwide computing infrastructure, built in 2009-2011, under the scientific project PL-Grid - Polish Infrastructure for Supporting Computational Science in the European Research Space. Its purpose was to enable scientific research based on advanced

computer simulations Computer simulation is the process of mathematical modelling, performed on a computer, which is designed to predict the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be dete ...

and large-scale computations using the computer clusters, and to provide convenient access to the computer resources for research teams, also outside the communities, in which the High Performance Computing centers operate.

The history

In the first decade of the twenty-first century in most European countries advanced Grid programs have been created. Besides, the European and worldwide consolidation took place in form of various projects, which concerned the Grid technology and HPC: EGEE, e-IRG, PRACE,

DEISA The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) was a European Union supercomputer project. A consortium of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries promoted pan-European research on Eu ...

and

OMII-Europe The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europea ...

. Poland has also undertaken efforts to build the National Grid,PL-Grid - Koncepcja budowy ogólnopolskiej infrastruktury Gridowej
Zofia Mosurska, Kazimierz Wiatr, AGH bulletin, p. 13-14, 10.2007. because without such infrastructure it would not be possible for Polish scientific communities to participate in many research programs, particularly in the EU 7th Framework Programme. Another reason to initiate steps towards the Polish Grid creation was the fact that in Poland the number of intensively cooperating, geographically dispersed research teams, was increasing. In case of such cooperation, tools for gathering and sharing of accumulated knowledge on a global scale were essential. In 2007, with the support of almost all European countries, EGI Design Study project was created. Its goal was to prepare the rules of integration of national Grids (National Grid Initiatives) in Europe into a stable, production

infrastructure Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and priv ...

- European Grid Initiative - which would begin its operation in 2010. It helped start work on establishing National Grid Initiative in Poland already in 2007, by setting up the PL-Grid Consortium.

PL-Grid Consortium, project and infrastructure

The PL-Grid Consortium was established by five Polish supercomputing and networking centers:
Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet
AGH, Kraków (the coordinator)
Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling
Warsaw University, Warsaw
Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center
Poznań
Information Center of the Academic Computer Network

Gdańsk Gdańsk ( , also ; ; csb, Gduńsk;Stefan Ramułt, ''Słownik języka pomorskiego, czyli kaszubskiego'', Kraków 1893, Gdańsk 2003, ISBN 83-87408-64-6. , Johann Georg Theodor Grässe, ''Orbis latinus oder Verzeichniss der lateinischen Benen ...

Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing
Wrocław In 2009-2011, the activity of the Consortium was supported by the PL-Grid project,News from the National Grid Initiatives - Poland
Zofia Mosurska, Jacek Kitowski, EGI Newsletter, p. 3, 11.2009.Project profile: PL-Grid
, D. Venton, iSGTW newsletter, issue 193, 22.09.2010.Moce obliczeniowe – produkt dla naukowców
Kazimierz Netka, Dziennik Bałtycki, 04.2010.Wrocławskie Centrum Sieciowo-Superkomputerowe w PL-Grid
, Bartłomiej Balcerek, Igor Wawrzyniak, WCSS bulletin “Pryzmat”, pp. 59–61, 05.2010.Superkomputery dla polskiej nauki
, Kazimierz Wiatr, Forum Akademickie, 09.2010.PL-Grid – Polska Narodowa Inicjatywa Gridowa dla naukowców w Polsce
Zofia Mosurska, Jacek Kitowski, Robert Pająk, Kazimierz Wiatr, Miesięcznik PAK (Pomiary, Automatyka, Kontrola) vol. 56, pp. 1117-1118, 10.2010.Parallel Large Scale Simulations in the PL-Grid Environment
, Krzysztof Kurowski, Tomasz Piontek, Piotr Kopta, Mariusz Mamoński, Bartosz Bosak, Computational Methods in Science and Technology, Special Issue, pp. 47-56, 12.2010.Duży może więcej
"Fundusze i Nauka. Dobre Projekty", pp. 14-15, 12.2010 co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund within the Innovative Economy Operational Programme. The result of the operation of the Consortium was the establishment of the Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid, formed by the merger of new, powerful computational resources, purchased and installed in the data centers belonging to the PL-Grid Consortium.

Computational resources

Computational resources available in the Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid include (at the end of the PL-Grid project): 5.8 PBytes of storage capacity and 588 TFlops of computing power. One of the clusters within Polish Grid Infrastructure i
Zeus
-

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

installed in Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków - in 2010, 2011 and 2012, the most efficient

in Poland.

Enabled software packages

On the PL-Grid infrastructure resources there are available scientific software packages which allow researchers in the field of biology,

quantum chemistry Quantum chemistry, also called molecular quantum mechanics, is a branch of physical chemistry focused on the application of quantum mechanics to chemical systems, particularly towards the quantum-mechanical calculation of electronic contributions ...

, physics, numerical computations and simulation to conduct large-scale computations: ADF, AMBER, AutoDock, BLAST, Blender, CFOUR, Clustal, CPMD, Dalton, FLUENT,

GAMESS GAMESS is a computational chemistry software program and stands for General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System. The original Quantum Chemistry Program Exchange (QCPE) code of GAMESS split in 1981 and now the three version differ consi ...

Gaussian Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) is the eponym of all of the topics listed below. There are over 100 topics all named after this German mathematician and scientist, all in the fields of mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The English eponymo ...

, GROMACS,

Mathematica Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimizat ...

, Matlab, Meep, MOLPRO, MOPAC,

NAMD Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD, formerly Not Another Molecular Dynamics Program) is computer software for molecular dynamics simulation, written using the Charm++ parallel programming model. It is noted for its parallel efficiency and is often ...

NWChem NWChem is an ab initio computational chemistry software package which includes quantum chemical and molecular dynamics functionality. It was designed to run on high-performance parallel supercomputers as well as conventional workstation clusters. ...

, OpenFOAM, POV-Ray, R and TURBOMOLE.

Implemented tools

Within the PL-Grid infrastructure, there are available several tools that support design and running the scientific applications on the distributed computational resources, organization of computational experiments, visualization of applications' results and resources management:

g-Eclipse The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europea ...

, GridSpace2,Exploratory Programming in the Virtual Laboratory
Eryk Ciepiela, Daniel Harężlak, Joanna Kocot, Tomasz Bartynski, Marek Kasztelnik, Piotr Nowakowski, Tomasz Gubała, Maciej Malawski, Marian Bubak, Proceedings of the International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology 2010, pp. 621–628, 10.2010. QosQosGridExploratory Programming in the Virtual Laboratory
, K. Kurowski, T. Piontek, P. Kopta, M. Mamoński, B. Bosak, Parallel Large Scale Simulations in the PL-Grid Environment, COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Special Issue 2010, 47-56. and Migrating Desktop. Aside from user-end tools, several software packages for administrators have also been developed, namely ACARM-ng and KeyFS. These security-related projects are also useful as a standalone solutions, being PL-Grid's contribution to an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

community.

Innovation in PL-Grid

The creation of the national grid infrastructure was an enterprise with a very large potential of innovation, mentioned in all government documents setting the directions of the development of the Polish science, technology and economy. To fulfill the aim „Growth of the competitiveness of the Polish science” of the Innovative Economy Operational Program, the science sector must have been strengthened by provision of the suitable research base. The grid infrastructure constituted such a base, on which the specialized systems specific for various fields of science were created, involving services and tools oriented on the used types of applications. The Polish Grid Infrastructure is continuously maintained and extended within the PLGrid Plus projectPLGrid PLUS: Toward Domain-Specific Infrastructure for Supporting International Research Collaboration
J. Kitowski, Ł. Dutka, Z. Mosurska, R. Pająk, M. Sterzel, T. Szepieniec, Proceedings of EGI Community Forum 2012 / EMI Second Technical Conference, 26–30 March 2012, Munich, Germany, PoS(EGICF12-EMITC2)147. (2012-2014): "Domain-oriented services and resources of Polish Infrastructure for Supporting Computational Science in the European Research Space – PLGrid Plus“. Its most important task is preparation of specific computing environments – so called domain grids – i.e., solutions, services and extended infrastructure (including software), tailored to the needs of different groups of scientists.

References

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External links

The web site of the PL-Grid project in the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH

The web site of the Polish Ministry of Regional Development
- the Managing Authority of the Innovative Economy Operational Program
The web site of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education
- the Intermediate Body in implementation of the priority 2. "Research and Development infrastructure" Grid computing