BiG Grid and VL-e
Nikhef is a founding partner of the BiG Grid project.
BiG Grid is the Dutch national grid initiative, with a funding of roughly 30 million Euro. In involves the deployment and operation of a large scale national infrastructure to fulfill the computing and storage needs of e-Science in the Netherlands in the coming years. High energy physics is the traditional hungry consumer of bulk compute power and storage, but in recent years we see other activities on the rise, such as medical imaging and life sciences.
One of the goals of BiG Grid is to help more sciences onto the grid. Getting 'on the grid' can seem an insurmountable task at first. With the help of our local application support specialists, we hope to make it a little less daunting.
The VL-e project is a research project that explores various technologies to make better use of the underlying grid infrastructure. Nikhef participates in the area of scaling and validation, where ideas are tested in the real world to prove their worth. For example, the medical imaging project achieved successful integration with the grid through a user-friendly interface known as the VBrowser, part of the VL-e toolkit, that allows medical doctors to store MRI scans and start grid jobs.
Related links:
http://www.biggrid.nl
http://www.vl-e.nl