SuGI

D-Grid II, Sustainability Concepts for Academia and Industry

SuGI is a gap project of the D-Grid Initiative (www.d-grid.de) with the goal of implementing grid computing across the board and making it usable. The project is oriented towards a number of computing centres in universities and companies that have not used grid technology up to now or only use it on a small scale. They receive support in relation to the provision of grid resources and services.

In addition to establishing a scaled training infrastructure, technical assistance for the installation and operation of middleware, as well as in the development and evaluation of legal and organisational structures, SuGI makes a sustainable contribution to developing a grid platform for e-Science in Germany.
The core task of SuGI involves disseminating the Grid across the board and making it usable. Thus, SuGI is oriented towards a number of computing centres in universities and companies that have only introduced grid technologies on a small scale up to now. A backlog still exists in terms of the grid requirements, such as a uniform connection to the power network for all resource providers and consumers.

During the course of the project, the knowledge gained in the DGI project will be made suitably accessible to the computing centres and IT departments of SMEs as well as universities and other research institutions. In order to achieve this, SuGI provides training and external events in the form of online content to the greater Grid community (http://sugi.d-grid.de/). The aim here is to investigate the suitability of concepts from the field of e-Learning and to take up appropriate methods.

In addition to disseminating the necessary knowledge, the project is also tasked with enhancing the usability of the middleware. Those who have had some initial experience with the established grid middleware will know that installing and maintaining it is by no means a trivial task. But this effort hampers the development of a unified Grid infrastructure. For this reason, SuGI is working towards simplifying the installation and maintenance procedures. The focus of this work includes task-specific installations as well as standard installations on virtual machines. This reduces the amount of adjustment effort required to bare essentials and promotes the standardisation of installation and the general productivity of the Grid.

Apart from the mere installation of the software, an institution will have to carry out regular maintenance tasks throughout the course of the lifecycle of a grid instance. SuGI will develop means that make these tasks much simpler and allow service providers to concentrate on the actual task of providing services. 

A third significant aspect which is a prerequisite for a sustainable grid infrastructure will be considered in parallel. Before workflows can be used across institutional and national boundaries, a number of organisational and legal questions have to be clarified. These questions are of central importance to all service providers, particularly against the backdrop of the current federal reforms in Germany. In this context, issues relating to licensing laws will also be investigated so that it is possible to provide a wide variety of grid services in Germany.

Business aspects such as profitability and issues relating to standards must also be taken into consideration. The knowledge gained in this context will then be represented in the form of case studies that will highlight the ways in which new, potential service providers can provide their services efficiently and profitably.