Feature - Global science up close: workshops in India

Gurdwara Bangla Sahib Sikh Temple in New Delhi, India. Image courtesy youngrobv, all rights reserved.

Editor’s note: Every month, readers from 134 different countries read iSGTW. One of the places where it is most popular is India, which always ranks in our top 5 or 6 countries for number of readers. Herewith is a report on the grid in India, from one person’s visit to a conference there.

Recently, I had the opportunity to observe global science from the other side of the globe. I was in New Delhi attending two workshops: the EU-INDIA workshop hosted by the Indian National Science Academy, and the EU-IndiaGrid2 Kickoff Workshop at the Indian Institute of Technology.

At these meetings, representatives from European and Indian research compared approaches to building and maintaining e-Infrastructures and sought areas ripe for collaboration.

India and the European Union have cooperated on science and technology through formal agreements for the last 10 years. India currently has links to CERN, is a member of ITER — the fusion research project — and is invited to be involved in the Research Infrastructures defined in the ESFRI roadmap. (You can learn more about the roadmap in 25 November 2009 edition of iSGTW).

Image courtesy Garuda, India's national grid computing initiative.

Enter NKN

To increase the capacity of its current e-Infrastructure, India is establishing a National Knowledge Network (NKN), which is essentially an upgrade of the network backbone that will be extended to all the research and education establishments across India.

Its roll-out has started and the existing EGEE and GARUDA (the national grid infrastructure) sites will be migrated to NKN. The plans for the EC co-funded TEIN3 network link to Europe were also presented.

In terms of supercomputing, India assembles its own clusters using commercial, off-the-shelf components, but has no equivalent of DEISA or PRACE, the European supercomputing infrastructures, or of TeraGrid, the American supercomputing infrastructure.

At the close of the day, the Indian National Academy and EC representatives summarized briefly the areas for future collaboration and said they would be submitting a written set of recommendations to their superiors. The most likely areas for collaboration are solar energy and fusion research.

At the second workshop, the one day EU-IndiaGrid2 kick-off meeting the project coordinator Alberto Masoni highlighted that the project will not build an infrastructure itself but act as a bridge between the Indian and European infrastructures. A roadmap milestone is scheduled for the first quarter of the project which should outline how India will interact with EGI.

Watch this space for more updates.

—Bob Jones, EGEE project director. See more on GridCast