INFN Grid - History

History

The INFN Grid project, approved in late 1999, has developed and deployed the first Italian Grid Infrastructure, based on GARR, the Italian research network. This is now a well known and largely used facility well integrated with various Grid infrastructures all over the world. It counts more than 30 sites, among the most important Italian universities and, although primarily focused on physics, it has been, since the beginning, open to other fields of research (bio-medicine, earth observation, etc.) and to industry. It represents a successful example of collaboration between physicists, software engineers, computer professionals, computer scientists and Italian industries.

With a grant received from the MIUR-FIRB funds (governmental funds for investment in fundamental research), for the Grid.it project, INFN with other National Research Institutions paved the way in 2002 for the development of a common production grid infrastructure supporting the Italian Research Area (IRA).

In collaboration with CERN, various European countries and some industries, INFN Grid launched in 2001 the largest FP5 European grid project, DataGrid, a milestone towards an infrastructure supporting the common European Research Area (ERA). With the same partners it furthermore promoted the DataTAG project, which has provided interoperability solutions for the development of a World Grid for Science with US and Asian-Pacific areas. This work has been further extended by CERN's LHC Computing Grid Project (LCG), where INFN is one of the main contributing partners, which has deployed a worldwide grid service, integrating the capacity of scientific computing centers distributed throughout Europe, America and Asia to enable the analysis of the large amount of data produced by the new CERN accelerator starting in 2007.

With the CERN coordination and the collaboration of other institutes from almost all European countries, INFN has promoted the series of EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) FP6 project that has created a seamless European Grid infrastructure for the support of the European Research Area connected to the other major grid infrastructures in the world.

Since its beginning INFN Grid has been and is the national container for INFN to coordinate and integrate the internal efforts for the development of the grid middleware, the deployment and operation of the national grid infrastructure and the dissemination activities towards industries and the society, with the contribution to several European and International Grid projects and to the GGF standardization activities.