GRID@IFCA

The year 2001 is when IFCA got involved in the field of distributed computing and grid techniques. First of all IFCA took part in the proposal of one European Project within the V Framework Programme called CrossGrid, in which IFCA was the coordinator of the International Testbed with 15 sites distributed around Europe interoperable with the DataGrid Project Testbed in which took part initially. Futhermore, IFCA installed one of the first national certification authorities, and the first Spanish testbed with grid technology.

In 2002 IFCA took part in the preparation of the coordinated project  “Development of DataGrid Infrastructure for LHC dates analisys”. Within this project IFCA participates in several tasks that could be grouped in three lines: coordination and dissemination, development of the software in a Grid enviroment, services of distributed computing for the Monte Carlo production and processing data.

In the year 2003 IFCA participated in the Spanish contribution to the european project EGEE. The CSIC participation in this project (IFCA, IFIC, CNB and RedIRIS) was coordinated by IFCA. In the preparation of this participation IFCA acted like a developer of the Irisgrid Initiative.

For 2004 IFCA got several subventions of infrastructure through the CSIC and the UC, which allowed add to the centre computer services an IBM 3584 Robot with LTO player and three Racks with direct capacity for 600 TB without compression, a fibre optics link direct to the connection point of RedIRIS in Cantabria, with a high performance Juniper Router and a new dedicated domain (ifca.es), and a computing system with a cluster of IBM 180 CPU Xeon Servers and three dedicated servers  OpenPower with 16 GB of RAM for images processing.

These resources consolidate the denominated e-Science Center of Cantabria, initiative presented in November of 2002 and appears referencing, for example, in the “e-Science White Book ” prepared by FECYT in the year 2004.

In the year 2005 IFCA took part in three europen projects proposals that are funded, these projects are: the second phase of EGEE (called EGEE-II), EELA project that establish a collaboration with Latin America (coordinated by CIEMAT), and a coordinated project by IFCA, and with the participation of 12 european sites more with significant computing capacity and expertise in grid technology, called Interactive European Grid (started on May, 2006). The objective of this project is the deployment of an advanced Grid empowered infrastructure in the European Research Area specifically oriented to support the execution of interactive demanding applications. The Interactive European Grid, while interoperable with EGEE, will focus on interactive use for medicine, environment, physics and other research areas (from robotics to archaeology) where demanding interactive applications that can benefit from being grid-enhanced have been identified.