BalticGrid II

The mission of BalticGrid-II is to expand and consolidate the Baltic e-Infrastructure and to support and promote e-Science on the political, advisory, technical and monitoring level. The overall strategy of the BG-II Grid Operations is to provide a sustained, high quality Grid infrastructure in the Baltic States and Belarus.

BalticGrid-II aims to create a Baltic e-Science ecosystem and integrate it into European Research Area. This will be achieved mostly by identyfying new scientific and academic communities in Baltic States and Belarus or by expanding existing ones. The following application areas were identified, which will be under special attention of the BalticGrid-II project: High-energy Physics, Engineering Modeling, Bioinformatics and Biomedical Imaging, Linguistics, Material Sciences and Quantum Chemistry, Modeling of Baltic Sea Ecosystem, Experimental and Astrophysical Thermonuclear Fusion.

Project infrastructure

The overall strategy of the BG-II Grid Operations is to provide a sustained, high quality Grid infrastructure in the Baltic States and Belarus. The activity will build on the same infrastructure, which was deployed in BalticGrid project and has proven its efficiency and maintainability. The objective is to make the resources - made available through the Grid - accessible to user communities structured as virtual organizations across the region, or Europe, or beyond in a professionally managed, persistent, reliable and secure way.

The Grid Operations activity will investigate options to support - in addition to the current gLite based middleware - also UNICORE and ARC middlewares, which have user bases in the vicinity to the Baltic States as well as some user communities using these middlewares also within the Baltics. This gives the region a unique opportunity to act as a beta tester for all of the possible combinations of interoperability between the three middlewares as no other region in Europe has all three middlewares used in the same small area.

Network Provisioning

The overall strategy of BG-II is to ensure reliable network connectivity for Grid infrastructure in the Baltic countries and Belarus, as well as to ensure optimal network performance for large file transfers and interactive traffic associated with Grid. BG-II will follow the best practice established by other projects like EGEE and SEE Grid by forming production level Central Network Coordination Centre as a coordinating body and National Network Coordination Centres responsible for local activities and communication with users. One of the activities of Network Coordination Centres will be monitoring of network resources. The collected data can be useful in service problem detection and overall availability evaluation. Network and service monitoring systems will be integrated into common monitoring system for Grid infrastructure.

Policy and standard development

BalticGrid-II will continue efforts started in the BalticGrid project on coherent policy and standard development to foster further development of e-Infrastructure in the Baltic States and Belarus, as well as will strengthen cooperation and human networking activities and will provide interoperability and effective functioning of BalticGrid-II infrastructure within European Grid infrastructure.

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