4th IBERGRID Conference

As one of the instruments for intensifying collaboration between Spanish and Portuguese institutions and researchers working on Computation Grid activities, the decision was taken to hold a series of annual conferences, alternating from one country to the other. The 1st IBERGIRD Conference – Iberian Computation Grid Network was held in Santiago de Compostela on 14-16 May 2007, only six months after the decision taken at the Luso-Spanish Summit of 2006 to establish IBERGRID; the 2nd IBERGIRD Conference – Iberian Computation Grid Network was held exactly a year later in Porto, from 1 to 14 May 2008, and the 3rd IBERGIRD Conference – Iberian Computation Grid Network was held in Valencia, Spain, from 20 to 22 May 2009.

The 2010 holding of IBERGRID includes, for the first time, a significant number of researchers and institutions from South America, with the aim of increasing the relations between Portugal and Spain and Latin American countries with regard to Grid Computing.

The IBERGRID 2010 Conference Programme includes presentations and discussions of various aspects of the Computation Grid and its applications, including those in Biomedicine (and Breast Cancer in particular), nanotechnology and Materials Science, high energy physics, astrophysical plasmas, forest fires and civil defence, and climate and ecology.

The 4th IBERGIRD Conference – Iberian Computation Grid Network includes the 2nd Iberian Working Sessions on Supercomputing, following on from the first holding of this event, which was also held as part of the annual IBERGRID conference. Besides specific aspects of supercomputing services, these working days will also consider applications in areas such as climate, more specifically cyclones, climate changes and atmospheric contamination, the science and technology of materials, and quantum physics.

The union of Portugal and Spain in IBERGRID has enabled the construction of a joint network, under the scope of a project financed by the EU Framework Programme EGEE – Enabling Grids for E-sciencE in Europe, known as the European Southwest Federation, which at present has more than 1 500 CPUs and now plays a significant role in the GRID structure of Europe.

Portugal launched the National GRID Initiative (INGRID) on 29 April 2006. This initiative was one of the components of the e-Science area in Portugal and was planned, monitored and partially financed by The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and the work it carries out related to R&D is done through funding granted by Science and Technology Foundation (FCT), following a public tender for projects and independent international evaluation. A call for tender for funding for R&D and demonstration projects in GRID computation was launched by FCT in November 2006 and the INGRID’06 Day took place in the same month in Braga. 15 R&D projects were approved involving a total funding granted by FCT of around 1.7 million euros, which were approved in the public tender opened in November 2006 which received 37 submissions. These projects involve Grid Computing applications in areas which range from data simulation and analysis of high energy Physics such as those produced by the LHC – Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and plasma physics and nuclear fusion, to forecasting the evolution of the maritime coastline, simulating forest fires, mapping atmospheric pollution, protein structure simulation, medical applications storage and brain imaging.

In 2007, using financing from The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and the Operational Programme for the Knowledge Society (POSC), it was decided to establish a main node for the GRID infrastructure at FCCN - the Foundation for National Scientific Computation- which has involved setting up a large 400 m2 GRID data centre, and an increase in the Portuguese Grid infrastructure to around 1 178 CPUs (1.2% of the total of the 55 EGEE countries), 996 TeraBytes of disc memory (4.0% of the total of the 55 EGEE countries) and 2 PetaBytes of long-term memory on magnetic tape (3.8% of the total of the 55 EGEE countries) in June 2009. This has given Portugal a significant dimension at a European level, which already corresponds to a part of the European infrastructure considerably greater to the weighting of Portugal both in terms of R&D expenditure and in terms of GDP.

The National GRID Initiative (INGRID) has been able to reach this current situation starting from an extremely modest position in April 2006, given that the national infrastructure of GRID computing involved only 70 CPUs, 22 TeraBytes of disc memory and practically no magnetic tape memory. That is, from 2006 to 2009 the number of CPUs multiplied more than 25 times, disc memory more than 45 times and magnetic tape memory went from being almost non-existent to an extremely high level within the international context.

The National GRID Initiative (INGRID) also envisaged strengthening national and international connectivity with a significant increase in the bandwidth of the national Science and Education Network, the Science, Technology and Society Network (RCTS – Rede Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade), managed by FCCN and financed by UMIC. This increase in connectivity has been achieved through various projects: The installation of 400 Km of fibre optic cable from FCCN in Lisbon to Braga (in 2005) and from Porto to Valença (in 2007) and from Lisbon to the Fronteira do Caia with Spain (in 2008), reaching 1 000 Km of fibre optical cable of FCCN and enabling connections of up to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) between research institutions and universities, which corresponds to around 85% of all the Portuguese Higher Educational System (taking into account the size of the institutions), the connection to the Geant European teaching and research network through Spain, the connection of RCTS to the Geant network at 10 Gbps in July 2008, more than an eightfold increase in the bandwidth of international connections which were available in July 2005.

A two year project funded by the EU was started in 2007 to prepare for the setting up and modelling of the organisation of the (EGI – European Grid Initiative).  This project involves the national GRID initiatives of 38 countries, including the 27 EU countries as well as Belarus, Croatia, Israel, Moldova, Montenegro, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey and the Ukraine. Portugal is represented by UMIC and by LIP, the senior figures of which form part of the GRID European Initiatives Policy Council, to which Professor Gaspar Barreira, the Director of LIP, was elected President. This project was successfully concluded and in 2009 gave rise to the setting up of the international organization the European Grid Initiative (EGI – European Grid Initiative).

In less than two years, Portugal had certainly put itself on the European GRID Computing map and ensured the means for Portugal and Spain to participate through a position of influence in decisions concerning the future of the European GRID initiative and the gigantic GRID Computing system which is being set up, and this position has been reinforced since then.