Nuredduna Computer Cluster

The Grid

The term grid computing originated in the early 1990s as a metaphor for making computer power as easy to access as an electric power grid.

As Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman told us in "The Grid" book in 1998: The current state of computing would be analogous to the state of development of electricity power in the beginning of the XX century. The true revolution came not from the production of electricity but from the possibility of distributing it transparently over a network.

Using the grid allows the coordinated use of computational resources in a decentralized way, and they are usually used for solving scientific, technical or business problems that require a great number of computer processing cycles.

One of the main problems for descentralized resources is the security, that is achieved by using digital certificates.

Bringing together many different groups in this collaborative effort is known as Virtual Organizations (VOs). These VOs are flexible, can remain for a long period or can disappear just as quickly as they were created.

Grid-CSIC

The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is deploying a distributed computing infrastructure to facilitate CSIC researchers the accomplishment of scientific projects requiring computing resources beyond the capabilities of a single user or research group. The Grid-CSIC infrastructure intends to foster multidisciplinarity and joint projects between CSIC centers.

IFISC became a member of Grid-CSIC in early 2010. The Nuredduna grid cluster is a resource shared among the collaborating CSIC centers.

The coordination is done from the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA), and the resources are distributed through the Spanish geography. IFISC became a member of these initiative in early 2010, adding its Nuredduna Grid Cluster to the resources shared between different research centers.

The centers involved in Grid-CSIC are:

• Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA)
• Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC)
• Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA)
• Centre d'Investigació en Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (CIN2)
• Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona (ICMAB)
• Centro de Física Miguel Antonio Catalán (CFMAC-IEM/IO/IFF)
• Institut de Física Interdisciplinar i Sistemes Complexox (IFISC)

Researchers from CSIC will have access to over 8000 CPUs and a total storage of more than 1PB (1000TB). It is built in a completely interoperable way, which allows the resources to be shared with similar initiatives in Europe and World-Wide.

Grid-CSIC participates on the Spanish National Grid Initiative (NGI) that is part of the European Grid Initiative (EGI).