Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA)

DEISA is a consortium of leading national supercomputing centres in Europe. It aims to jointly build and operate a distributed terascale supercomputing facility. The project consists of several phases.

The first phase was a proof of concept, carried out over 2004-5. During 2004, four supercomputing sites were connected:

• Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ), Germany
• Rechenzentrum Garching of the Max Planck Society (RZG), Garching, Germany
• Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique (IDRIS), Orsay, France
• Consorzio Interuniversitario (CINECA), Bologna, Italy

During the second phase of the proof of concept three additional end sites have been added:

• SARA Computing and Networking Services, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Leibniz Computing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (LRZ), München, Germany
• Finnish Information Technology Centre for Science (CSC), Espoo, Finland

Each end site is connected to its local national research and education network (NREN) with a dedicated gigabit Ethernet connection. The network connectivity is based on routed IP. Within the GÉANT2 network, MPLS LSPs with a Premium class of service are used to offer the high guaranteed capacity requested by DEISA, and to be able to control the routing in order to prevent any possible impact on the best-effort service in case of route changes.

DEISA has ambitious plans for its next phase of network connectivity. This will be based on dedicated gigabit and 10 gigabit Ethernet connections provided by the NRENs involved and GÉANT2. At a project meeting held in July 2005 in Munich, an architecture team was appointed to design and document the new DEISA network infrastructure. Minutes of this meeting can be accessed via the link below.

The following GÉANT2 10Gbps point-to-point circuits have now been requested between NRENs hosting DEISA sites and the central DEISA hub in Frankfurt:

• SURFnet-DFN (delivered December 2006) – connecting SARA, Amsterdam
• RedIRIS-DFN (delivered January 2007) – connecting BSC, Barcelona
• RENATER-DFN (to be delivered in February 2007) – connecting IDRIS, Orsay.