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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The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is described. The detector operates at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It was conceived to study proton-proton (and lead-lead) collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV (5.5 TeV nucleon-nucleon) and at luminosities up to 10³⁴ cm⁻² s⁻¹ (10²⁷ cm⁻² s⁻¹). At the core of the CMS detector sits a high-magnetic-field and large-bore superconducting solenoid surrounding an all-silicon pixel and strip tracker, a lead-tungstate scintillating-crystals electromagnetic calorimeter, and a brass-scintillator sampling hadron calorimeter. The iron yoke of the flux-return is instrumented with four stations of muon detectors covering most of the 4π solid angle. Forward sampling calorimeters extend the pseudorapidity coverage to high values (|η| ≤ 5) assuring very good hermeticity. The overall dimensions of the CMS detector are a length of 21.6 m, a diameter of 14.6 m and a total weight of 12500 t.

Key words: Computing, Cloud Computing, Grid Computing, Detector Infrastructure and Safety Systems, Data Acquisition, Trigger, Muon System, Forward Detectors, Hadron Calorimeter, Electromagnetic Calorimeter, Inner Tracking System, Superconducting Magnet

At the time of this paper, the apparatus is essentially completed and installed. After more than 10 years of design and construction, the CMS magnet has been constructed and successfully tested. Most of the magnetic, electrical, mechanical, and cryogenics parameters measured during the tests are in good agreement with calculated values. The CMS magnet is the largest superconducting solenoid ever built for a physics experiment in terms of bending power for physics, total stored energy, and stored energy per unit of cold mass. The silicon-strip inner tracker, with about 200 m2 of active silicon, has been integrated into its support tube, commissioned, and thoroughly tested with cosmic rays. Its performance is excellent, fulfilling the design specifications. The silicon tracker was installed into CMS in december 2007. All the pixel modules are completed; it is planned to install the Pixel detector into CMS in mid-2008. The ECAL, comprising over 75 000 lead tungstate crystals, is the largest crystal calorimeter ever built. The crystals in the barrel part, comprising over 60 000 crystals, have been intercalibrated using cosmic rays and about a third in particle beams, demonstrating the ability to measure the energies ranging from those deposited by minimum ionising particles to high-energy electrons. An energy resolution of 0.5% for 120 GeV electrons has been attained. The ECAL barrel has been installed in the experiment and is being commissioned. The endcaps are foreseen to be inserted into the experiment in 2008. The entire HCAL has been completed and commissioned on the surface. The HCAL modules are currently being commissioned in the experiment proper. The various components of the Muon System (drift tubes, cathode strip chambers, resistive plate chambers) have been completed. A significant fraction of the Muon System has been commissioned and tested on surface with cosmic rays, and it is now being integrated into the experiment and being commissioned in-situ. In the very forward region, the Zero Degree Calorimeter has been completed and CASTOR is expected to be completed in 2008. The off-detector electronics are currently being installed and operations for trigger commissioning are taking place. Common data-acquisition runs with various sub-detectors, sometimes using cosmic rays, are regularly taking place at the experiment and will continue into spring 2008 in anticipation of collisions at LHC in mid-20

A few More pictures:

Full article available at the following link:

The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/3/08/S08004

Your help in sharing the idea is very welcome!

The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC
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the CMS Collaboration, The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, Journal of Instrumentation (JINST 3 S08004), 14 August 2008

• Full list of Articles
• Full list of Journal Publications

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Abstract: Current grid technologies offer unlimited computational power and storage capacity for scientific research and business activities in heterogeneous areas all over the world. Thanks to the grid, different virtual organisations can operate together in order to achieve common goals. However, concrete use cases demand a closer interaction between various types of instruments accessible from the grid on the one hand and the classical grid infrastructure, typically composed of Computing and Storage Elements, on the other. We cope with this open problem by proposing and realising the first release of the Instrument Element (IE), a new grid component that provides the computational/data grid with an abstraction of real instruments, and grid users with a more interactive interface to control them. In this paper we discuss in detail the implemented software architecture for this new component and we present concrete use cases where the IE has been successfully integrated.

Keywords: grid; instrument; Instrument Element; IE.

Authors: F. Lelli*, E. Frizziero, M. Gulmini, G. Maron, S. Orlando, A. Petrucci and S. Squizzato

We cope with this open problem by proposing and realizing the first release of the IE, a new grid component that provides the computational/data grid with an abstraction of real instruments, and grid users with a more interactive interface to control them. The main benefits of the proposed solution are: A highly modular and flexible solution: (a) The middleware deployment is organised into pluggable independent components. (b) The IE architecture is not tied to specific technologies or third-party software. (c) Multiple and independent I/O interfaces: Commands and Controls directed at Instruments, Fast Data Publishing, Data Movement to/from the grid.

• A highly modular and flexible solution: (a) The middleware deployment is organised into pluggable independent components. (b) The IE architecture is not tied to specific technologies or third-party software. (c) Multiple and independent I/O interfaces: Commands and Controls directed at Instruments, Fast Data Publishing, Data Movement to/from the grid.
• High scalability: (a) IE is portable to different platforms. (b) The target environment ranges from large farms to embedded devices.
• IE middleware aims to be used in production environments: Mature middleware has been used, whenever possible, to assure robustness and stability.
• Fine customisation of the IE: The IE is easily adaptable to diverse scenarios and needs.
• High level of abstraction in the IE interfaces: (a) Service Oriented Architecture (b) Adherence to standards: WS-I-compliant web services.
• EGEE (gLite) compatibility: Many grid facilities and tools can be reused, for instance GridFTP or SRM interface for data movement.

Get the Article at this link

A #SOA ( #service Oriented Architecture) approach for #integrate #InternetOfThings devices into a #CloudComputing infrastructure. #servicedesign
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Cite this paper as:
Lelli, F., Frizziero, E., Gulmini, M., Maron, G., Orlando, S., Petrucci, A., & Squizzato, S. (2007). The many faces of the integration of instruments and the grid. International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 3(3), 239. 

https://doi.org/10.1504/IJWGS.2007.014953

• Full list of Articles
• Full list of Journal Publications

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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

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli 

Grid/ Cloud computing offers to their users a virtually unlimited computational infrastructure. Users usually interact with this system using a command line interface thus limiting its use to people that are familiar with computers. The goal of the thesis is to expose similar functionality using Web based APIs thus exposing Grid functionalities to a larger audience. 
The candidate will design and implement this APIs offering functionality like: (i) user authentication; (ii) job submission; (iii) data transfer; (iv) job monitoring and notification. Moreover it will validate the quality of his design choices implementing a Facebook or a WordPress plug-in. 

During this thesis the candidate will have the opportunity to contribute to existing open source projects in order to improve the present tools and enable them with interfaces for Web 2.0 APIs for Grid Computing

Knowledge and Skills:

Web Programming, Java Programming and basic knowledge of Distributed Systems. 

Where to know more:

Read this introduction about cloud computing and looks at the following references:

[1] GridComputing:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing
[2] REST: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer 
[3] Facebook APIs http://developers.facebook.com/ 
[4] WordPress plugin http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin 

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