|
Press release
e-Toile: the first French high performance data transfer grid | |||
|
Paris, July 10, 2003 |
|||
| e-Toile
is the first major French high performance data transfer grid project. This
platform project, supported by the Réseau National des Technologies
Logicielles (RNTL) and coordinated by the CNRS, brings together almost fifty
engineers and researchers from the CNRS, INRIA, and from universities and
industries in the data processing sector, including Communication &
Systems (CS) and SUN . It also includes academic and industrial users: the
CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission), EDF (French Electricity Board), the
IBCP (Protein Chemistry and Biology Institute – CNRS), and the UVSQ/PRISM
(Université de Versailles). The project team presented its first
results during a demonstration organized in June at the Ecole Normale Supérieure
in Lyon, France. Created in 1999 with the support of the Ministry of Research and New Technologies and the Ministry of the Economy, Finances and Industry, the aim of the RNTL is to promote the creation of innovative cooperative research and development projects between private companies and public research teams in the software field. e-Toile is a high performance data processing grid that is operational and interconnected to European and international grids such as DataTag (Trans Atlantic Grid). It is among the leading grids in the world and provides French teams with an extraordinary experimental tool. It has a heterogeneous platform that includes seven geographic locations, ten nodes (server clusters) and 200 different processors with access operating systems with 1 or 2 gigabits/second at each site, provided by France Telecom's VTHD very high speed network. In order to validate the contributions of this new high performance grid concept, the project's user-partners have chosen and "gridified" a series of particularly complex and voluminous applications. Run times were compared to those of other software repositories such as Globus , demonstrating the advantages resulting from active networks and the new file management system on the e-Toile grid. For example, thanks to parallel replications and the management of e-Toile's programmable service quality, it was possible to transfer 800-megabyte images of brain cross-sections from Rennes to Lyon in constant time (7.72 s), despite the presence of other major data flows, demonstrating the extraordinary potential of this new grid architecture. Thanks to e-Toile, middleware has been designed and is available in the form of open-source software through the integration of components developed by French research teams as well as their industrial partners. e-Toile has demonstrated its important contribution to the integration of systems software and complex applications for both research and industry. But what is the future of e-Toile? First of all, this platform will be extended within the framework of pre-competitive European and French projects, in complementarity with other platforms specialized in dealing with computer research problems. This will be done by taking into account its key role in the investigation of users needs and by taking advantage of the experience acquired in experimental grid engineering. e-Toile will then take its place among other research-based consortiums in order to make high-level modular component systems for data processing grids available to developers. In the words of Gérard Roucairol, president of the RNTL, "The grid concept is the stuff of our dreams. It represents a new set of problems that is not on the scale we are normally used to. But the major problem is its implementation. The RNTL framework that covers both research and industry is particularly well adapted to it. An operational approach such as e-Toile was absolutely necessary to make this type of project a success." As a result of its participation in the e-Toile project, the CNRS has demonstrated its desire to reach out to and work with the world of industry. IPV6 "Really Very High Speed" experimental network, implemented by France Télécom R&D within the framework of the RNRT project (French National Telecommunications Research Network). Globus Toolkit: is an open source software toolkit for building grids, developed within the framework of the GLOBUS project. INRIA: ID-IMAG (Laboratoire Informatique et Distribution Informatique et Mathématique Appliqué de Grenoble), IRISA (Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires) and RESO (Réseaux Haut Débit, Protocoles et Services), UVSQ/PRISM (Université de Versailles, Saint Quentin), ENS/LIP (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Lyon/laboratoire de l’informatique du Parallélisme), CNRS/UREC (CNRS network unit), CS (Communication & Systems) and SUN. Researcher
contact:
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
||