Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid, a nationwide computing infrastructure, built in 2009-2011, under the scientific project PL-Grid - Polish Infrastructure for Supporting Computational Science in the European Research Space. Its purpose was to enable scientific research based on advanced

computer simulations Computer simulation is the process of mathematical modelling, performed on a computer, which is designed to predict the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be dete ...

and large-scale computations using the computer clusters, and to provide convenient access to the computer resources for research teams, also outside the communities, in which the High Performance Computing centers operate.

The history

In the first decade of the twenty-first century in most

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

an countries advanced Grid programs have been created. Besides, the

an and worldwide consolidation took place in form of various projects, which concerned the Grid technology and HPC: EGEE, e-IRG, PRACE,

DEISA The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) was a European Union supercomputer project. A consortium of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries promoted pan-European research on Eu ...

and

OMII-Europe The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europea ...

. Poland has also undertaken efforts to build the National Grid,PL-Grid - Koncepcja budowy ogólnopolskiej infrastruktury Gridowej
Zofia Mosurska, Kazimierz Wiatr, AGH bulletin, p. 13-14, 10.2007. because without such infrastructure it would not be possible for Polish scientific communities to participate in many research programs, particularly in the EU 7th Framework Programme. Another reason to initiate steps towards the Polish Grid creation was the fact that in Poland the number of intensively cooperating, geographically dispersed research teams, was increasing. In case of such cooperation, tools for gathering and sharing of accumulated knowledge on a global scale were essential. In 2007, with the support of almost all

an countries, EGI Design Study project was created. Its goal was to prepare the rules of integration of national Grids (National Grid Initiatives) in Europe into a stable, production

infrastructure Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and priv ...

- European Grid Initiative - which would begin its operation in 2010. It helped start work on establishing National Grid Initiative in Poland already in 2007, by setting up the PL-Grid Consortium.

PL-Grid Consortium, project and infrastructure

The PL-Grid Consortium was established by five Polish supercomputing and networking centers:
Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet
AGH,

Kraków Kraków (), or Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 ...

(the coordinator)
Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling
Warsaw University,

Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center

Poznań Poznań () is a city on the River Warta in west-central Poland, within the Greater Poland region. The city is an important cultural and business centre, and one of Poland's most populous regions with many regional customs such as Saint John ...

Information Center of the Academic Computer Network

Gdańsk Gdańsk ( , also ; ; csb, Gduńsk;Stefan Ramułt, ''Słownik języka pomorskiego, czyli kaszubskiego'', Kraków 1893, Gdańsk 2003, ISBN 83-87408-64-6. , Johann Georg Theodor Grässe, ''Orbis latinus oder Verzeichniss der lateinischen Benen ...

Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing

Wrocław Wrocław (; german: Breslau, or . ; Silesian German: ''Brassel'') is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the River Oder in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Europe, rou ...

In 2009-2011, the activity of the Consortium was supported by the PL-Grid project,News from the National Grid Initiatives - Poland
Zofia Mosurska, Jacek Kitowski, EGI Newsletter, p. 3, 11.2009.Project profile: PL-Grid
, D. Venton, iSGTW newsletter, issue 193, 22.09.2010.Moce obliczeniowe – produkt dla naukowców
Kazimierz Netka, Dziennik Bałtycki, 04.2010.Wrocławskie Centrum Sieciowo-Superkomputerowe w PL-Grid
, Bartłomiej Balcerek, Igor Wawrzyniak, WCSS bulletin “Pryzmat”, pp. 59–61, 05.2010.Superkomputery dla polskiej nauki
, Kazimierz Wiatr, Forum Akademickie, 09.2010.PL-Grid – Polska Narodowa Inicjatywa Gridowa dla naukowców w Polsce
Zofia Mosurska, Jacek Kitowski, Robert Pająk, Kazimierz Wiatr, Miesięcznik PAK (Pomiary, Automatyka, Kontrola) vol. 56, pp. 1117-1118, 10.2010.Parallel Large Scale Simulations in the PL-Grid Environment
, Krzysztof Kurowski, Tomasz Piontek, Piotr Kopta, Mariusz Mamoński, Bartosz Bosak, Computational Methods in Science and Technology, Special Issue, pp. 47-56, 12.2010.Duży może więcej
"Fundusze i Nauka. Dobre Projekty", pp. 14-15, 12.2010 co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund within the Innovative Economy Operational Programme. The result of the operation of the Consortium was the establishment of the Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid, formed by the merger of new, powerful computational resources, purchased and installed in the data centers belonging to the PL-Grid Consortium.

Computational resources

Computational resources available in the Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid include (at the end of the PL-Grid project): 5.8 PBytes of storage capacity and 588 TFlops of computing power. One of the clusters within Polish Grid Infrastructure i
Zeus
-

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

installed in Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH University of Science and Technology in

- in 2010, 2011 and 2012, the most efficient

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...

Enabled software packages

On the PL-Grid infrastructure resources there are available scientific software packages which allow researchers in the field of

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

quantum chemistry Quantum chemistry, also called molecular quantum mechanics, is a branch of physical chemistry focused on the application of quantum mechanics to chemical systems, particularly towards the quantum-mechanical calculation of electronic contributions ...

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

, numerical computations and

simulation A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of Conceptual model, models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or proc ...

to conduct large-scale computations: ADF,

AMBER Amber is fossilized tree resin that has been appreciated for its color and natural beauty since Neolithic times. Much valued from antiquity to the present as a gemstone, amber is made into a variety of decorative objects."Amber" (2004). In Ma ...

, AutoDock, BLAST, Blender, CFOUR, Clustal, CPMD, Dalton, FLUENT,

GAMESS GAMESS is a computational chemistry software program and stands for General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System. The original Quantum Chemistry Program Exchange (QCPE) code of GAMESS split in 1981 and now the three version differ consi ...

Gaussian Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) is the eponym of all of the topics listed below. There are over 100 topics all named after this German mathematician and scientist, all in the fields of mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The English eponymo ...

, GROMACS,

Mathematica Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimizat ...

Matlab MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation ...

, Meep, MOLPRO, MOPAC,

NAMD Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD, formerly Not Another Molecular Dynamics Program) is computer software for molecular dynamics simulation, written using the Charm++ parallel programming model. It is noted for its parallel efficiency and is often ...

NWChem NWChem is an ab initio computational chemistry software package which includes quantum chemical and molecular dynamics functionality. It was designed to run on high-performance parallel supercomputers as well as conventional workstation clusters. ...

OpenFOAM OpenFOAM (for "Open-source Field Operation And Manipulation") is a C++ toolbox for the development of customized numerical solvers, and pre-/post-processing utilities for the solution of continuum mechanics problems, most prominently including ...

, POV-Ray, R and TURBOMOLE.

Implemented tools

Within the PL-Grid infrastructure, there are available several tools that support design and running the scientific applications on the distributed computational resources, organization of computational experiments, visualization of applications' results and resources management:

g-Eclipse The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europea ...

, GridSpace2,Exploratory Programming in the Virtual Laboratory
Eryk Ciepiela, Daniel Harężlak, Joanna Kocot, Tomasz Bartynski, Marek Kasztelnik, Piotr Nowakowski, Tomasz Gubała, Maciej Malawski, Marian Bubak, Proceedings of the International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology 2010, pp. 621–628, 10.2010. QosQosGridExploratory Programming in the Virtual Laboratory
, K. Kurowski, T. Piontek, P. Kopta, M. Mamoński, B. Bosak, Parallel Large Scale Simulations in the PL-Grid Environment, COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Special Issue 2010, 47-56. and Migrating Desktop. Aside from user-end tools, several software packages for administrators have also been developed, namely ACARM-ng and KeyFS. These security-related projects are also useful as a standalone solutions, being PL-Grid's contribution to an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

community.

Innovation in PL-Grid

The creation of the national grid infrastructure was an enterprise with a very large potential of

innovation Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity ...

, mentioned in all government documents setting the directions of the development of the Polish

science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...

and

economy An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the ...

. To fulfill the aim „Growth of the competitiveness of the Polish science” of the Innovative Economy Operational Program, the science sector must have been strengthened by provision of the suitable

research Research is "creativity, creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular att ...

base. The grid infrastructure constituted such a base, on which the specialized systems specific for various fields of science were created, involving services and tools oriented on the used types of applications. The Polish Grid Infrastructure is continuously maintained and extended within the PLGrid Plus projectPLGrid PLUS: Toward Domain-Specific Infrastructure for Supporting International Research Collaboration
J. Kitowski, Ł. Dutka, Z. Mosurska, R. Pająk, M. Sterzel, T. Szepieniec, Proceedings of EGI Community Forum 2012 / EMI Second Technical Conference, 26–30 March 2012, Munich, Germany, PoS(EGICF12-EMITC2)147. (2012-2014): "Domain-oriented services and resources of Polish Infrastructure for Supporting Computational Science in the European Research Space – PLGrid Plus“. Its most important task is preparation of specific computing environments – so called domain grids – i.e., solutions, services and extended infrastructure (including software), tailored to the needs of different groups of scientists.

References

{{Reflist

External links

The web site of the PL-Grid project in the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH

The web site of the Polish Ministry of Regional Development
- the Managing Authority of the Innovative Economy Operational Program
The web site of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education
- the Intermediate Body in implementation of the priority 2. "Research and Development infrastructure" Grid computing