The German Grid Initiative (D-Grid)
In a joint initiative with German research and industry, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the development of D-Grid.
The first D-Grid projects started in September 2005 with the goal of developing a distributed, integrated resource platform for high-performance computing and related services to enable the processing of large amounts of scientific data and information. Development and operation of this grid infrastructure is proceeding in several overlapping stages:
D-Grid 1, 2005-2008
IT services for scientists, designed and developed by the 'early adopters' of the computer science and scientific computing communities. This global services infrastructure is being tested and used by so-called Community Grids in the areas of high-energy physics, astrophysics, alternative energy, medicine, climate research, engineering, and scientific libraries.
D-Grid 2, 2007-2010
IT services for scientists, industry, and business,
including applications in the construction industry, finance, aerospace and automotive, enterprise information and resource planning systems, geographical data, and general IT services.
Next steps will extend the grid infrastructure with a professional management and operation layer, including Service Level Agreements for negotiation between providers and users, providing knowledge management, adding several virtual competence centres, encouraging global service-oriented architectures in the industry, and using this grid infrastructure for the benefit of our whole society.
A random example of D-Grid activities:
C3Grid - Konsortium
The world data centres WDC Climate, WDC RSAT and WDC Mare as well as Germany’s National Meteorological Service (DWD) and several other scientific institutes with specialised datasets provide a broad data basis. Scientists from of all major German earth science institutions are in the consortium and take part in the development and implementation of the C3Grid. They are supported by specialists from applied computer science from ZIB and University Dortmund.
