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The European Grid Infrastructure selects a software developed by ICCUB to give researchers access to computing resources

By 24 de March de 2014November 18th, 2020No Comments
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Group on Experimental Particle Physics of ICCUB. Photo: UB.
 24.03.2014

The European Grid Infrastructure selects a software developed by ICCUB to give researchers access to computing resources

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), an organization that offers integrated computing services to European researchers by means of grid computing techniques —a computer model that enables to make operations by using thousands of computers —, has selected a software developed by scientists of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of UB (ICCUB) to open its computing resources to the highest number of European researchers. We are talking about DIRAC, an open source software framework that includes all the necessary components to build complete distributed computing systems and access the data of one of the experiments performed by the Large Hadron Collider. The Bosch i Gimpera Foundation (FBG) will support the dissemination of the platform and manage transfer contracts with third parts.


The aim of the pilot is to “open European grid infrastructures to any researcher who needs operations for his/her research”, explains Ricardo Graciani, ICCUB researcher and coordinator of the project. Thus, EGI, which includes the resources of 350 computing centres in 33 countries (Spain is included) and several institutions such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), will use DIRAC to manage data produced by the experiment LHCb, which searches the differences between matter and antimatter in LHC.

By means of this technology, any scientist from a research institution recognized by EGI will be able to use computing resources form hundreds of computers. Therefore, a high number of researchers will be able to access EGI resources, which are now mostly focused on LHC’s computing needs.

Furthermore, DIRAC developers work for interconnecting cloud commercial computing systems, so users can access these services and get computing resources for their research which are different from the operation centres included in EGI. DIRAC has been developed by a consortium led by ICCUB and composed by the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, France) and CERN; shortly, other international scientific institutions will join it. The Spanish National Plan for Particle Physics and the National Centre for Particle, Astroparticle and Nuclear Physics (CPAN) also collaborated in the project.

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