The ISS GRID system for research in physics and related fields has been declared of national interest as a result of Government Decision no. 786/2014 on approving the List of installations and objectives of national interest, funded by the Ministry of National Education.
A Grid is a distributed computing infrastructure that enables the common use and sharing of computing resources, storage and other resource types. Grids use the resources available at a time on several separate computers, interconnected via a network, to solve CPU [1] or storage intensive problems.
The largest site within the ISS Grid is ISS-ALICE, which is dedicated to the ALICE-CERN Collaboration. With 40 Worker Nodes and over 380 Cores, this site has processed over 900 000 jobs in 2014. This year, the total data traffic of this Grid site was over 2.1 PB [2]. The second site dedicated at this time to ALICE and Pierre Auger collaborations is RO-13-ISS, with 8 Worker Nodes and over 120 Cores.
Besides these, the ISS infrastructure also includes sites dedicated to collaborations within the space missions of the European Space Agency (ESA): Planck, Euclid, Cluster and Venus Express. ISS-Planck has 16 Worker Nodes and more than 140 Cores, while the ISS-RoSpaceGRID has 26 Worker Nodes and over 200 Cores.
Grid infrastructure is an essential and a priority area for the Information Society in Romania due to the direct impact on performance parameters and effective use of national information infrastructure, including its connectivity to the global infrastructure. The ISS Director, Ion Sorin Zgură, founded and led since 2005 the working group for drafting the national GRID strategy, being the promoter of the development for the first time in Romania of an innovative technology for parallel intensive processing in High Energy Physics data analysis. In 2007, the Romanian Space Agency (ROSA) founded the RomanianGRID CA Certification Authority, which is providing PKI services (Public Key Infrastructure) for the GRID activities of the Romanian academic and research communities.
Along with the ISS GRID system, have been declared GRID structures of national interest also the Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering „Horia Hulubei”, the National Institute of Research and Development for Isotopic and Molecular Technologies Cluj-Napoca, „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, the National Center for information Technology of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.
The Government Decision is available here.
The Institute of Space Science (ISS) from Magurele, Romania, conducts scientific research in areas such as Astroparticle Physics, High Energy Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology, Space Plasma Physics, Solar-Terrestrial Interaction Physics, Interplanetary Environment Physics and Space Weather. It also performs activities related to applied research, design and development of space technologies. ISS has been involved in collaborations and partnerships renowned both nationally and internationally (CERN-ALICE, FAIR, ANTARES, KM3NeT, Pierre Auger Observatory), in ESA’s space programme through space missions such as Euclid, Planck, Cluster and in the first Romanian experiment on board of the International Space Station.
Note
[1] CPU, Central Processing Unit
[2] PB, PetaByte