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Europe and Latin America integrated by grids

The main objective of the shared e-infra-structure Project between Europe and Latin America (Eela, from the name in English) is to integrate European and Latin American e-science projects. Begun in January, 2006 and scheduled to last for two years, Eela has funding of roughly 1.7 million euros, coming from the European Union Commission (EU) through the Information Society Technologies (IST) program. The project is coordinated by Ciemat (Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Investigations), of Spain.

The 21 entities which make up the Eela Project have established a collaboration network to share a computer grid infrastructure, which will serve as support for the development and testing of advanced applications. The goal is to create a common infrastructure, interconnected using the Clara and Géant networks, in which some applications will be implemented: biomedicine, high energy physics, distance learning and climate studies, among others.

EGEE: model for Eela

Eela follows the model of the European project EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science). In EGEE, there is sharing of close to 30,000 CPUs (central processing units)and 5 million gigabytes of storage resources (the equivalent to the capacity of more than 7 million CD’s), located in several countries of Europe.

There are several stages in the implementation of the Eela computer grid. One of the most important is the installation of a middleware which makes possible interoperation of computers connected to the infrastructure. Another important stage is the adaptation and scheduling of already existing projects to the new Eela environment for use of a large number of resources, distributed by the e-infrastructure, and the development of new applications.

In practice, what the project makes available to researchers is a very powerful infrastructure, bringing together a large volume of computer, communication and data storage resources, to perform complex investigations. Programs are distributed in several machines, which allows for data processing, on a large scale, of studies, for example, in medicine and bioinformatics, which require collection of a large quantity of information and combined checks all in a short period of time.

Partners

Renowned European institutions, such as the Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research), located in Switzerland, and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, in Italy, are part of Eela. In Latin America, seven countries are represented in the group, including Brazil, Chile and Argentina.

In Brazil, participating in the project are the Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (National Network for Teaching and Research)(RNP), the Federal Fluminense University (UFF) and the Rio de Janeiro Federal University (UFRJ), in addition to Cecierj/Cederj, a consortium of publicly-owned universities in the State of Rio de Janeiro.

Clara receives 8% of the funding to execute the program in Latin America. Half of these resources go to RNP, which hosts the group of engineers of the Clara Network, and is responsible for coordinating the network support for Eela.