Geant2 Speeds Supercomputers

CAMBRIDGE, U.K. -- The speed of collaborative research using Europe's network of supercomputers will be advanced by a major upgrade announced today. The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), has increased connectivity speeds ten-fold to 10 Gbps, through dedicated links designed and deployed by the GANT2 pan-European research and education network.

This will allow researchers in projects such as SEISSOL (research into earthquake simulations) and COMSIMM (looking at current and future climatetrends) to harness the combined processing power of DEISA's 200 teraflops of supercomputing infrastructure. Requests for supercomputing resources amongst scientific research domains are on the increase, with 23 projects scheduled for operation in 2007. Amongst these applications, projects in progress include ICAROS (stratospheric ozone research, climate change), gyro3d (plasma instability) and HELIUM (radiation-matter interactions).

GÉANT2 is the largest research and education network ever built in Europe.Extending over 50,000 km, it connects 34 countries on the continent and has extensive links to North America and Asia. Managed by international research and education network provider DANTE, it is co-funded by Europe's National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and the European Commission.

GÉANT2 and its partner NRENs currently connect seven DEISA sites across Europe - BSC (Spain), IDRIS (France), FZJ, HLRS, LRZ, RZG (all Germany) and SARA (The Netherlands) via dedicated 10 Gbps wavelengths, all managed by a central switch. Sites including CINECA (Italy), CSC (Finland), EPCC (UK) and ECMWF (UK) are scheduled for connection by mid-2007.

DEISA provides leading scientific researchers with access to a European cluster of state-of-the-art High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. The "private network" of point-to-point links deployed by GÉANT2 will enable researchers to gain faster and more efficient access to DEISA's shared file system, supporting ground-breaking applications in computational sciences.DEISA's aim is to create an integrated European HPC ecosystem before the end of the decade.Victor Alessandrini, Project Director, DEISA says: "The underlying aim of the DEISA project is to enable scientific discovery across a broad spectrum of science and technology. By exploiting the point-to-point connections thatGÉANT2 provides, we're able to create a high speed, integrated European supercomputing environment. This will enable us to share the massive computational resources that are needed for efficiency and performance. "

Dante