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GRID TECHNOLOGIES AND EARTH SCIENCE

by DEGREE — last modified 2007-08-03 14:50

What is GRID

Grid computing is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems. Grids provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by breaking them down into many smaller ones, or provide the ability to perform many more computations at once than would be possible on a single computer, by modeling a parallel division of labor between processes. Today resource allocation in a grid is done in accordance with SLAs (service level agreements).

What is Earth Science

Earth science (also known as geoscience, the geosciences or the Earth Sciences), is an all-embracing term for the sciences related to the planet Earth. It is arguably a special case in planetary science, being the only known life-bearing planet. There are both reductionist and holistic approaches to Earth science. The major historic disciplines use physics, geology, mathematics, chemistry, and biology to build a quantitative understanding of the principal areas or spheres of the Earth system.

What is DEGREE

The DEGREE project is proposed by a consortium of Earth Science (ES) partners that integrates research institutes, European organisation and industries, complementary in activity and covering a wide geo-cultural dimension, including Western Europe, Russia and Slovakia. The project aims to promote the GRID culture within the different areas of ES and to widen the use of GRID infrastructure as platform for e-collaboration in the science and industrial sectors and for select thematic areas which may immediately benefit from it. DEGREE aims to achieve this by showing how GRID services can be integrated within key selected ES applications, approaching the operational environment and shared within thematic community areas. The DEGREE project will also tackle certain aspects presently considered as barriers to the widespread uptake of the technology, such as perceived complexity of the middleware and insufficient support for certain required functionality. The ES GRID expertise, application tools and services developed so far will be promoted within the DEGREE consortium and throughout the ES community. Collective Grid expertise gathered across various ES application domains will be exchanged and shared in order to improve and standardise on application specific services. The use of worldwide Grid infrastructures for cooperation in the extended ES international community will also be promoted.

Human Proteome Folding - Example of Grid Projects

Since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, one of the greatest challenges facing scientists is to find functions for all of the proteins that are encoded in the Human Genome. When human protein structures are known, scientists can use them to research disease treatments and cures.

Today only a fraction of the 30,000 Human Genome proteins have known structures and functions. Being able to predict the structure of every protein in an organism will contribute to our overall understanding of how those predicted proteins interact with the organism as a system. Can you imagine trying to fix a car or a machine knowing the function of only 30% of the components? That is the situation that biomedical and biological researchers, to their credit, operate in. Thus, anything that can shed light on these mystery proteins is highly valuable to the field of biology and medicine.

EGEE - Enabling Grids for E-sciencE

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project brings together scientists and engineers from more than 90 institutions in 32 countries world-wide to provide a seamless Grid infrastructure for e-Science that is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day. Conceived from the start as a four-year project, the second two-year phase started on 1 April 2006, and is funded by the European Commission.

Expanding from originally two scientific fields, high energy physics and life sciences, EGEE now integrates applications from many other scientific fields, ranging from geology to computational chemistry. Generally, the EGEE Grid infrastructure is ideal for any scientific research especially where the time and resources needed for running the applications are considered impractical when using traditional IT infrastructures.

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DEISA - Distributed European Infrastructure for Supecomputing Applications

DEISA is a consortium of leading national supercomputing centres that currently deploys and operates a persistent, production quality, distributed supercomputing environment with continental scope. The purpose of this FP6 funded research infrastructure is to enable scientific discovery across a broad spectrum of science and technology, by enhancing and reinforcing European capabilities in the area of high performance computing. This becomes possible through a deep integration of existing national high-end platforms, tightly coupled by a dedicated network and supported by innovative system and grid software.

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