→ We want to help enable computers, storage, networks, instruments, and visualization resources to take part in a national grid and make them available to research communities across Canada.

→ We want to help Canadian research communities deploy applications that can use a Canadian grid.

What is the Grid?

The central metaphor is that of a power grid where suppliers and consumers interact transparently with respect to one another. Imagine being able to tap in to compute and storage resources in a similarly transparent way on demand and from anywhere in the country.

The grid community is quite active in working towards standard, secure ways of accessing distributed resources. Visit the external links for other groups that are trying to define and build grids around the world.

Ian Foster has a three-point checklist that defines grids in terms of

• distributed, heterogeneous management domains;
• open protocols, interfaces, and schemas; and
• high aggregate performance of many different aspects of the system.

For further high-level descriptions, look at What is the Grid?. Produced by NCSA, it's a good introduction by means of recorded interviews with many of the key figures in the grid community.

Some Background

A memorandum of understanding was signed in August of 2001 between CANARIE, the C3.ca, and National Research Council. The three agreed they would monitor interdependencies, agree about technical directions, share project management, and define a Grid focus in projects. Each brings expertise to the table: advance networks, high performance computing systems, and advanced multi-laboratory eScience projects, respectively.

The Grid Canada project is committed to enabling a core grid infrastructure for use by all these three and their partners as well as effectively using the resources they can provide. Some infrastructure has already been built, and Grid Canada has inculcated itself into the development of several applications that will use this infrastructure. Some examples include NRC's iHPC, CANARIE's Lightpath, and University of Victoria's Data Grid projects.

The NRC President's Challenge has resulted in a $3 million grid-based, multi-scale computation platform for modelling of nano-structure and biological materials. The core grid infrastructure will be built and supported by a team internal to NRC in conjunction with Grid Canada.

The CANARIE Customer-Empowered Lightpaths project is developing standard interfaces to allow the provisioning of end-to-end lightpaths across heterogeneous network resources. This work is proceeding with an eye towards the next generation of grids based on the Open Grid Services Architecture, a Web Services enabled infrastructure that can leverage emerging web standards. Grid Canada is actively tracking this next generation and planning new infrastructure support.

Researchers at the University of Victoria will be taking part in experiments at CERN that will be extremely data intensive. They need access to infrastructure that is being build by the European Union Data Grid effort. Grid Canada is working towards harmonizing its infrastructure with respect to the EU Data Grid so that the science can be done in the Canadian grid community as well as the explosively growing international grid community.

We Want Your Input!

→ What kind of grid and application middleware do you use, and what would you like to see supported?

→ What kind of services do you want Grid Canada to provide?

→ What resources have you grid-enabled and which ones you would like to grid-enable?

→ What applications would you like to see running on the grid?

If you have answers to any of these questions, or you just want to learn more, contact <gridmaster@gridcanada.ca>.