The DEISA Consortium was awarded a three-year contract within the EU Framework Programme 7. As of 1 May 2008, the FP7 DEISA2 project has been helping to enhance the European HPC Infrastructure to create an integrated HPC ecosystem.
Within EU FP7 the DEISA Consortium, which operates the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, continues to support and further develop the distributed high performance computing infrastructure and its services through the DEISA2 project funded for three years as of May 2008.
The service provisioning model will be extended from one that supports single projects to one supporting Virtual European Communities. Collaborative activities will be carried out with new European and other international initiatives.
Of strategic importance is the cooperation with the PRACE project which is preparing for the installation of a limited number of Tier-0 supercomputers in Europe. The key role and aim will be to deliver a turnkey operational solution for a future persistent European HPC ecosystem, as suggested by ESFRI. The ecosystem will integrate national Tier-1 centres and the new Tier-0 centres.
In spring 2002, the idea emerged to overcome the fragmentation of supercomputing resources in Europe both in terms of system availability and in the necessary skills for efficient supercomputing support. The establishment of a distributed European supercomputing infrastructure was proposed.
In May 2004 the DEISA project was started as an EU FP6 Integrated Infrastructure Initiative by eight leading European supercomputing centres. In 2006 DEISA was joined by three additional leading centres. Through the joint efforts, DEISA reached production quality soon after to support leading edge capability computing for the European scientific community. DEISA has also contributed to a raising awareness of the need for a persistent European HPC infrastructure as recommended in the ESFRI report 2006.
The DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI), launched in 2005 with annual calls, has supported challenging European supercomputing projects during the last three years. For the most challenging projects the most powerful and appropriate supercomputer architectures available in Europe could be offered. So far scientists from 15 different European countries with collaborators from four other continents have benefited.
In the DEISA2 projects, the DECI is continued, but these single-project oriented activities will be qualitatively extended towards persistent support of Virtual Science Communities. DEISA2 will provide a computational platform for them, offering integration via distributed services and web applications, as well as managing data repositories. Emphasis will be put on collaborations with research infrastructure projects established by the ESFRI, and European HPC and Grid projects. The activity reinforces the relations to other European HPC centres and leading international HPC centres and HPC projects world-wide. For supporting international science communities across existing political boundaries, DEISA2 participates in the evaluation and implementation of standards for interoperation.
Taking care of the operation of the infrastructure and the support of its efficient usage is the task of the three service activities Operations, Technologies and Applications, which are complemented by two Joint Research Activities.
In addition to the eleven DEISA members from seven countries, BSC/Spain, CINECA/Italy, CSC/Finland, ECMWF/UK, EPCC/UK, FZJ/Germany, HLRS/Germany, IDRIS/France, LRZ/Germany, RZG/Germany and SARA/The Netherlands, the three centres CSCS/Switzerland, KTH/Sweden and JSCC/Russia join the DEISA2 project as associated partners.
