Grid Computing
Kenichi Miura (National Institute of Informatics, NAREGI, Japan)
Abstract:
In my talk, I will review the current status of some major Grid
projects in the world, and describe in some detail the National
Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) project on Grid middleware research
and development in Japan as an example, and its relation to the new
national project on the next generation supercomputer development
project.
The National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI), which originally
started as a five-year project in FY 2003, under the auspices of the
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and technology (MEXT),
as one of the major Japanese national Grid projects.
Collaboration among industry, academia, and the government will play a
key role in NAREGI.
The Center for Grid Research and Development has been established at
the National Institute of Informatics as a core center for R\&D on
high-performance, scalable Grid middleware technologies, which are
aimed at providing a future computational infrastructure and
environment for scientific and engineering research.
As an example of utilizing such Grid technologies in the scientific
communities, The Computational Nanoscience Center, another core center
of NAREGI, located at the Institute for Molecular Science in Okazaki,
is conducting research on leading-edge, grid-enabled nanoscience and
nanotechnology simulation applications.
NAREGI released its beta version Grid middleware in May 2006.
The NAREGI Grid middleware is expected to be utilized as one of the
software layers in the nation-wide Cyber Science Infrastructure (CSI)
framework, which has been newly initiated at the National Institute of
Informatics.
In the meantime, MEXT initiated a new project in April 2006, to design
and develop the next generation supercomputer system. This is a 7 year
project, with an expected total budget of ~1B $.
The objectives of this project are development, installation and usage
of the multi-petaflops class supercomputing system as a national
leadership machine to be utilized by academia, research communities
and industries.
This project includes such programs as research and development of the
system software and the grand challenge applications, development of
the hardware system, and establishment and operation of the Advanced
Center for Computational Science and Technology based on the said
system.
NAREGI will continue to conduct research and development on Grid
middleware as a part of the system software development
program. Within the new framework, NAREGI is directed toward providing
the seamless computational environment to research and academic
communities in the forthcoming "peta-scale" era.
Keywords:
None.
