DEISA – Cooperative Extreme Computing Across Europe

Abstract

The European DEISA¹ project is an infrastructure of infrastructures – eleven of the leading European High Performance Computing (HPC) centers in Europe interconnected by a 10 Gb/s high speed network – that devised an innovative strategy to enable the cooperative operation of existing national supercomputing infrastructures. This initiative led to the deployment and operation of a world class, persistent, production quality, distributed tera-scale supercomputing environment with continental scope enabling scientific discovery across a broad spectrum of sciences and technologies. The paper describes in detail the DEISA infrastructure and high speed network interconnect, its operation and management, as well as user support procedures. The second part explains the used Grid middleware and Grid security models as well as its integration into the local security policies. The third part of the paper gives a comprehensive overview about lessons learned. The paper closes with a summary and a vision on future DEISA project extension plans.