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June 18, 2007
GÉANT2 Helps Drive High-Speed Supercomputer Projects
CAMBRIDGE, England, June 14 -- The speed of collaborative research
using Europe’s network of supercomputers will be advanced by a major
upgrade announced today. The Distributed European Infrastructure for
Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), has increased connectivity speeds
ten-fold to 10 Gbps, through dedicated links designed and deployed by
the GÉANT2 pan-European research and education network.
This
will allow researchers in projects such as SEISSOL (research into
earthquake simulations) and COMSIMM (looking at current and future
climate trends) to harness the combined processing power of DEISA’s 200
teraflops of supercomputing infrastructure. Requests for supercomputing
resources amongst scientific research domains are on the increase, with
23 projects scheduled for operation in 2007. Among these applications,
projects in progress include ICAROS (stratospheric ozone research,
climate change), gyro3d (plasma instability) and HELIUM
(radiation-matter interactions).
GÉANT2 is the largest research
and education network ever built in Europe. Extending over 50,000
kilometers, it connects 34 countries on the continent and has extensive
links to North America and Asia. Managed by international research and
education network provider DANTE, it is co-funded by Europe's National
Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and the European Commission.
GÉANT2
and its partner NRENs currently connect seven DEISA sites across Europe
-- BSC (Spain), IDRIS (France), FZJ, HLRS, LRZ, RZG (all Germany) and
SARA (The Netherlands) -- via dedicated 10 Gbps wavelengths, all
managed by a central switch. Sites including CINECA (Italy), CSC, the
Finnish IT center for science (Finland), EPCC (United Kingdom) and
ECMWF (United Kingdom) are scheduled for connection by mid-2007.
DEISA
provides leading scientific researchers with access to a European
cluster of state-of-the-art high-performance computing (HPC) resources.
The “private network” of point-to-point links deployed by GÉANT2 will
enable researchers to gain faster and more efficient access to DEISA’s
shared file system, supporting ground-breaking applications in
computational sciences. DEISA’s aim is to create an integrated European
HPC ecosystem before the end of the decade.
Victor Alessandrini,
project director for DEISA, says, “The underlying aim of the DEISA
project is to enable scientific discovery across a broad spectrum of
science and technology. By exploiting the point-to-point connections
that GÉANT2 provides, we’re able to create a high-speed, integrated
European supercomputing environment. This will enable us to share the
massive computational resources that are needed for efficiency and
performance.”
“The DEISA supercomputing environment will deliver
a vital resource for the European research community,” said Hans
Döbbeling, general manager of DANTE. “By using GÉANT2’s point-to-point
connections, DEISA can ensure its users are able to maximise usage of
Europe’s supercomputing resources.”
About GÉANT2
GÉANT2
delivers the next-generation research and education network for Europe.
With over 30 million research and education users in 34 countries
across the continent, GÉANT2 offers unrivalled geographical coverage,
high bandwidth, innovative hybrid networking technology and a range of
user-focused services. Its network footprint maps more than 50,000 km
and its extensive geographical reach interconnects with other world
regions, enabling global research collaboration. Europe’s academics and
researchers can now exploit the power of dedicated GÉANT2
“point-to-point” links, creating optical private networks solely for
their use, that connect specific research centres.
GÉANT2 is
co-funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Research and
Development Framework Programme. The project partners are 30 European
National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), TERENA and DANTE. It
is coordinated by DANTE, the research networking organisation that
plans, manages and builds research networks all over the world. For
more information, visit www.geant2.net.
About DEISA
DEISA
is an EU-funded distributed supercomputing environment consisting of 11
of Europe’s supercomputers. It deploys and operates a number of
services that enable the cooperative operation of all the national
leading supercomputing platforms, and the high-performance access to
remote data repositories. The DEISA infrastructure's aggregated
computing power is over 190 teraflops. Focused on the advancement of
science in Europe, DEISA has moved in three years from the support of
an initial set of early users in various areas of science (Material
Sciences, Cosmology, Fusion Research, Life Sciences, Computational
Fluid Dynamics, and Environmental Sciences) to a full scale support of
leading, demanding, Grand Challenge applications in all areas of
science and technology that could not come to life otherwise. This is
implemented through the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative, launched in
2005 and reiterated in 2006. New Call for Proposals opened on April 30,
2007, for the third generation DECI projects. For more information,
visit www.deisa.org.
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Source: DEISA-----
Source: DEISA
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