France becomes one of the world leaders in research on computing grids with GRID 5000

.

Paris, February 10, 2005

Computing grids are the next Internet challenge. In addition to issues of computing power and storage, computing grids pool together a set of heterogeneous information sources and are akin to a virtual organization system that optimizes information sharing and certain industrial processes. The scientific study of the phenomena that occur within grids require the deployment of very large scale computing infrastructures. GRID 5000 puts 5,000 processors on the network. With this initiative, the French research community is acquiring equipment that is unparalleled worldwide for the study of computing grids and intends to achieve leadership in this field.

GRID 5000: a unique research equipment worldwide

France acquired its own research equipment, called GRID 5000, that pools together the computing capacities of 5,000 processors distributed over 8 sites all over the country: Bordeaux, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Orsay, Rennes, Sophia-Antipolis and Toulouse.
Each site is equipped with high performance parallel computers composed of clusters of machines. The clusters are interconnected via the Renater network.

This unique equipment makes it possible for scientist from various research organizations to pursue their work on computing grids. Thus, research scientists will be able to

• Observe and understand the complex phenomena occurring within large scale computer systems.
• Study, design, test and validate new software.
• Explore new approaches in the field of large scale, distributed computer systems.

With GRID 5000, France will have more extensive resources than the United States and Japan.

The whole of French computing research involved

All the French computing research organizations are participating in the GRID 5000 program, with support from the Ministry of Research, in the framework of the ACI GRID (Incitative Concerted Initiative on Globalization of Computer Resources and Data) initiatives. These organizations include the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automatic Control (INRIA), and universities.

High performance computing-barriers to be broken to meet tomorrow’s major industrial and society challenges

Such numerous and varied tasks as making meteorological or climate predictions, computing the aerodynamic behavior of a new aircraft, deciphering the genome of a living organism, detecting the elementary particles produced by an accelerator, and so on, require huge simulation computations or colossal amounts of data processing. These tasks are also increasingly ambitious and thus more and more demanding in terms of computing power, dataflow and memory capacity. Moreover, research scientists need to collaborate from all over the world and participate in the analysis of the results produced by numerical simulation. From now on, the new computing infrastructures will need to be large scale and distributed in order to meet such ever growing needs.

Research on computing grids must continue to meet the major challenges of tomorrow. With GRID 5000, France intends to participate in this development by testing and implementing the technology and infrastructure necessary to perform larger and larger computations. This will not only allow French research scientists to remain at the leading edge of worldwide competition, but will also foster the emergence of new applications that will enhance the competitiveness of the companies that need this type of infrastructure.

PDF Version of the Press Release.