Building a National Distributed E-Infrastructure -- PL-Grid: Scientific and Technical Achievements

The goal of the project is to provide the polish scientific community with an IT platform based on grid computer clusters, enabling e-science research in various fields. The created infrastructure is both compatible and interoperable with existing european and worldwide grid frameworks. The system ensures scalability and enables the integration of additional local clusters, belonging to universities, research institutions and technology platforms. This state-of-the-art survey describes the experience and the scientific results obtained by project partners as well as the outcome of research and development activities carried out within the Polish Infrastructure for Information Science Support in the European Research Space PL-Grid (PL-Grid 2011), held in December 2011 in Krakow, Poland. The 26 papers are organized in topical sections on: eclipse parallel tools platform integrated with QosCosGrid, the migrating desktop, science gateways based on the vine toolkit, the gridspace experiment platform, and the InSilico-Lab environment.

The PL-Grid was established to provide the Polish scientific community with a grid-based e-infrastructure, enabling the integration of experimental data and results of advanced computer simulations carried out by geographically distributed research teams.

The 26 papers presented in this state-of-the-art survey describe the experience and scientific results obtained by researchers involved in the PL-Grid project. Topics covered include: integration of grid middleware; service operations; security mechanisms; infrastructure monitoring, storage provisioning, and integration of service level agreements; and training and dissemination. In addition, five chapters focus on the application of the PL-Grid middleware and infrastructure to current scientific problems such as grain morphology analysis, chemistry computations, and molecular dynamics modes. The book is rounded off with a useful glossary of terms.