The Grid is a software-hardware infrastructure that provides unlimited access to computational resources – computing power and storage capacity – by using a set of standards and protocols. (Wolfgang Gentzsch)
Grid Computing is a scientific field of major importance in Romania. Currently, there are eight Grid sites in our country dedicated to collaboration with the CERN Geneva nuclear research center.
The RO-14-ITIM site is of major importance, being the only functional site in the northwest area of Romania. Since 2009, the RO-14-ITIM Grid Center has been integrated into the Tier 2 Romanian Federation, being registered in the European structures on the gocdb.egi.eu website. thus establishing important development directions in the field of data storage and processing.
Through the infrastructure it provides, the Grid center is an important tool for enhancing scientific activities at the internal, regional and national level. The Grid Center ensures a wide opening to the international research environment having a multidisciplinary utility, ensuring the premises for:
- increasing the number of researchers and IT engineers within the institute and attracting young people for CDI activity;
- facilitating access to high-performing research infrastructures by participating in large international research infrastructures;
- the integration of research staff into the international scientific community by ensuring international mobility, organizing and participating in international scientific conferences.
Among the priority fields that benefit from the complex advantages of high-performance data processing are particle physics, bioinformatics and nanotechnology, earth theory, chemistry of elements, followed by others no less important such as engineering, environment, education and training, economy.
In addition to the collaboration of the Grid RO-14-ITIM site with the ATLAS virtual organization from CERN Geneva, the facilities of the Grid center are used by numerous research groups in INCDTIM and by their partners within the ongoing projects.
The main user of the Grid RO-14-ITIM site is the ATLAS virtual organization within the International Collaboration of the ATLAS experiment at LHC-CERN Geneva, since its establishment over 11.5 million ATLAS jobs have been processed (accounting.egi.eu).
INCDTIM’s Grid Center as part of the national RO-LCG cluster makes its computing and storage resources available to cluster members. The high-performance computing system (HPC) is made available to the parallel computing laboratory in the biomolecular and nano-structures field of INCDTIM, in 2022 alone, over 6,000 jobs will be processed using specific modeling and simulation programs.