INRIA at the heart of Grid Computing research
September 2003

The GRID concerted initiative

In February 2001, the French Ministry of Research launched a scientific program called GRID (Globalization of Computer Resources and Data). This ACI (Incitative Concerted Initiative) is funded by the Science National Fund. Its objective is to reinforce French research in computing and data grids, so that it is able to rank well in international competition. Through this initiative, already active research teams are consolidated, new groups can be made aware of the field of grids, and computer scientists and users of these new technologies can meet in multidisciplinary teams. GRID relies on the high speed network platforms supplied by RENATER and the VTHD and on national or regional centers to develop several research directions that are necessary to build experimental grids (software tools, systems and environments for distributed computing or the exploitation of very large volumes of data, modeling, algorithmics, code coupling, visualization, and so on). Another objective of the GRID ACI is to foster company foundation in the field of ASP (Application Service Providers, i.e. companies that sell high added value computer services for specific applications such as financial analysis, simulation, virtual reality or data mining).

The GRID ACI grants financial support to research team consortiums following a call for proposals. The amounts distributed were 2.5 million euros in 2001 and 3 million euros in 2002, essentially in the form of operating funds and fixed term engineer contracts. GRID thus launched 18 projects in 2001 and 12 projects in 2002. As of today, there are therefore fourteen such projects. INRIA teams participate in thirteen of them:

• ARGE (Eastern Networks Group) gathering research teams in networks and distributed systems from the eastern part of France.
• GRID2 (Meeting, Information and Discussion Group on the Globalization of Computer Resources and Data) training young researchers, information diffusion, meeting organization for researchers involved in work on grids in France.
• CARAML (Coordination and Distribution of Multiprocessor Applications in Objective CAML) development of libraries for high performance globalized computing around the CAML language of INRIA in its Objective Caml or Ocalm dialect, examples of applications in molecular simulation.
• RMI (High Performance Distributed Objects for Computing Grids) development of a programming model for computing grids that combines parallel computing and distributed computing models.
• ASP (Client-Server Approach for Simulation on the Grid) validation of a NES (Network Enabled Servers) type architecture on a national grid for a set of applications in chemistry, physics, electronics and geology.
• GeoGrid, a proposal for innovative solutions for visualization and complex numerical computation problems, such as those encountered in oil exploration and exploitation.
• Guirlande-fr (Computer management and uses of language resources for the diffusion and study of the French language) setting up a distributed server grid to federate resources on the French language (coded and annotated texts) and tools to process these resources.
• CiGrid (CIMENT GRID) experimenting intensive computing on a grid made of the six platforms of project CIMENT (Intensive Computing, Modeling, Numerical and Technological Experimentation), each of the platforms being attached to a specific field (astrophysics and Earth science, environment and climate, cluster computing, chemistry, biology, physics).
• EPSN (Environment to Steer Distributed Numerical Simulations) design and development of a software platform to steer and conduct a distributed numerical application for visualization, validation on applications in molecular chemistry, environment and acoustics.
• GénoGRID: Setting up a computing grid for researchers in molecular biology, with applications in protein folding, genome and genetic sequence comparison. The grid comes with a simple access portal on the Web, that is transparent and secure.
• HydroGrid, modeling and simulation of fluid transfer and solution transport in underground geological media.
• MecaGrid, building a regional computing grid based on PC clusters located in the Provence-Alpes-Côtes d'Azur region, for applications of massively parallel computing in heterogeneous fluid mechanics.
• PADOUE (Data Sharing for Use in Environment) data and processing program interoperability in the field of environmental research, document and archiving methods to help in locating and identifying shared resources.
• DataGRAAL (DataGrid for animation and large scale applications) organizing meetings between the database and systems communities, links between the different French projects in the field of data grids, drawing up software projects on data management in large scale through preliminary mock-ups.

The Gelato consortium

INRIA joined the Gelato Federation in February 2003. The Gelato Federation aims at providing the Itanium (IA-64) community with the most current and useful open source resources for running Linux. INRIA is part of the Parallel File Systems, Cluster administration tools, runtime for parallel programming and distributed scheduling focus areas. INRIA contributes to experimentations on a cluster built with104 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors at 900 MHz interconnected using a Myrinet network. The involved INRIA projects are APACHE, OASIS, PARIS, ReMaP, RESO, and SARDES.