Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

TL;DR

The SEE-GRID program over six years built a regional distributed computing infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe, expanding resources and user communities, and transitioning to the EGI NGI-based model.

Contribution

This paper details the development, expansion, and transition of the SEE-GRID infrastructure to the EGI NGI model, highlighting regional collaboration and infrastructure growth.

Findings

Infrastructure grew from 20 to 55 resource centers.

Over 6600 CPUs and 750 TB storage are now available.

Successful transition to EGI NGI model.

Abstract

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.