South East European Grid Project

Rőczei Gábor <>
NIIF Intézet

The project receives European Commission support through Seventh Framework Programme under the "Research Infrastructures" action which will pave the way towards a long-term vision of a sustainable, transparent, ubiquitous electronic infrastructure in South East Europe (SEE). It will link existing and upcoming High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities in SEE in a common infrastructure, and it will provide operational solutions for it. As a complementary action, the project will establish and maintain a Gigabit European Academic Networking Technology (GEANT) link for Southern Caucasus. The project began on 6th September 2010 with the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) coordination.

It will support and strengthen a number of strategic Virtual Research Communities (VRC) too, which will bring together users across the SEE region within a common cooperative research space, enabling them to share HPC facilities, software, tools, data and results of their work. Thus, the project will directly contribute to the coordination of high-quality research and ease, and enhance the access and usability of the available infrastructure.

It brings together 14 partners from the SEE region, while more than 10 institutions have been selected to participate in the project as third parties to the consortium partners. Hungary represented by three partners: the consortium partner is the National Information Infrastructure Development Institute (NIIFI) and third parties are the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA-SZTAKI) and the Óbuda University.

The project consist of eight work packages and we are participating in several of them, for example: procurement guideline creation, HPC infrastructure installation, configuration, user papers writing, etc. We have main role by the software stack harmonization which means that different HPC softwares will be harmonized and they will be more interoperable with each other after this.

The MTA-SZTAKI will support the research communities by his portal framework which can be used for the applications. It is based on the new version of P-GRADE portal. This task is extended by the trainings which will be held about HPC topics. The Óbuda University will create two life science applications for the portal and these will be used by us to demonstrate the whole HPC SEE infrastructure movement principles.