• UDC:Ramón Doallo
  
• Cesga: Ignacio López

This project involves the design, development, implementation, testing and diffusion of a distributed computing system based on GRID technologies. The term GRID was used in the recent years as equivalent to metacomputer, and it can be defined as a software and hardware infrastructure that provides high level computing capacities with cheap, widespread, standardised and quality access.

Complexity represents one of the critical aspects of a GRID both for final users and for program developers. The development, refinment and optimisation of parallel and distributed applications on the GRID are difficult and tedious due to the changing and heterogeneous nature of the GRID infrastructure.

The main objectives are:

1. The creation of a Grid environment distributed between the University of A Coruña (UDC) and the Supercomputing Centre of Galicia (CESGA) allowing to analyse the implications of such an environment for task management and application implementation.

2. The development, implementation and documentation of a final user front-end allowing job distribution management for them to be executed on the GRID. It will be mainly used for scientific calculation or engineering commercial applications available at CESGA (Gaussian, Ansys, Matlab, etc).

3. The analysis of the coexistence of the different job distribution management systems (Globus, Condor, etc).

4. The creation of a guide on programming, adaptation and implementation of self developed or commercial applications in a GRID environment.

The current job is in line with the strategy designed for Galicia for both institutions, which targets to establish the new distributed computing technologies. This strategy has as a precedent the project for the development of the Galician Virtual Supercomputer leaded by CESGA (already completed). It will continue with the active participation of UDC and CESGA (in collaboration with the University of Santiago de Compostela) in the elaboration of the proposal for a more ambitious project, involving 23 institutions of 11 countries of the European Community (Cross Grid project).