National Grid Initiatives or Infrastructures (NGIs) are organisations set up by individual countries to manage the computing resources they provide to the European e-Infrastructure (EGI). NGIs are EGI’s main stakeholders, together with CERN and EMBL, two European Intergovernmental Research Organisations (EIROs).
Each NGIs contributes a number of sites to the grid infrastructure. NGIs are responsible for the maintenance and running of the sites they operate.

European Grid Initiative

In particular SwiNG’s mission is to:

• Ensure competitiveness of Swiss science, education and industry by creating value through resource sharing.
• Establish and coordinate a sustainable Swiss Grid infrastructure as a dynamic network of resources across different locations and administrative domains.
• Provide a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration to leverage the Swiss Grid activities, supporting end-users, researchers, education centers, resource providers and industry.
• Represent the interests of the national Grid community towards other national and international bodies.

It offer the following services to researchers and research groups:

• Scientific applications
• Tools
• Seminars and Training
• Events / seminars
• Engagement with Funding Agencies

As well as connecting research and industry partners with IT providers across Switzerland.

Withing SwiNG developed a couple of use cases. The first was related to the integration of volunteering computing with the “classical” computational infrastructure. The second integrated high level malware (workflow) into the Grid user interface in order to achieve proper optimization of the processes. In particular we created a wrap interface around the NorduGrid UI in order to offer API access to the computational facility.

Links:

• SwiNG in the EGI Wiki
• Official Website of SwiNG

Some relevant publications includes:

• This is work in progress, just look at the full list of publication here

If this is not the research project that you are looking for, at this link you can see the full list of projects

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Faced with an ever-increasing information flood in a complex and interconnected world, individual knowledge workers are in dire need for support in structuring their personal information space and maintaining fruitful communication and exchange within social networks across organizational boundaries. NEPOMUK develops technical support and stipulates and mobilizes community efforts to realize the Social Semantic Desktop.

This paradigm comprises a set of technical and methodological solutions for:

• supporting the knowledge life cycle via personal knowledge articulation support, embedding in personal work processes, and sharing, exchange and alignment across social networks
• cross-media and cross-application linking and browsing of information items based on standard semantic web data structures, together with un-intrusive metadata support
• knowledge communication within social networks and distributed search and storage to build, maintain, and employ inter-workspace relations in large scale distributed scenarios.

Links:

• Nepomuk in Wikipedia
• EU website of Nepomuk

Some relevant publications includes:

• This is work in progress, just look at the full list of publication here

If this is not what you are looking for, at this link you can see the full list of projects

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The project aims to extend the state of the art of computing grid technologies, by introducing the handling of real-time constraints and interactive response into the existing Grid middleware. Our goal is to build a widely distributed system that is able to remotely control and monitor complex instrumentation that ranges from a set of sensors used by geophysical stations monitoring the state of the earth to a network of small power generators to supply a national power grid. These new applications introduce, to the GRID, requirements that are strongly related to the availability of networks where network classes specifically tuned to address such real-time and highly interactive requests are implemented. One of the main objectives of the project is to verify, with real applications running on existing Grid testbeds over both national and international network infrastructures (e.g. GEANT) the feasibility of a Grid-based remote control of systems requiring real-time response. Data acquired from such instruments typically needs to be stored, analysed on-line to compare the data with a given model or to perform some predictions (e.g. meteorological applications). GRIDCC will integrate the proposed “grid of instruments”, or suitable emulators, into existing Grid infrastructures that will provide the computational and storage power needed for the applications. The reference architecture that is proposed here, along with the related software framework, introduces a new concept, that of a “Virtual Instrument Grid Service” (VlGS), which is a service enabling access, through the Grid, to any instrument by providing an appropriate interface on the instrument side. The architecture combines special-purpose services like virtual control rooms, diagnostic and problem-solving services, data-mining services and tele-presence, which are used to support various instruments with existing grid resources like computational farms and databases.

Links:

• EU website of GridCC

If this is not what you are looking for, at this link you can see the full list of projects

The post Grid Enabled Remote Instrumentation with Distributed Control and Computation (GridCC) appeared first on Francesco Lelli.