A glance to India again, GARUDA – Indian Grid, The National Grid Computing Initiative
By Bharat B. Tiwari, Praveen Mishra and Tejal Tiwary – ERNET, India
GARUDA, an initiative of Government of India was initiated in the year 2005 to connect eminent institutions and provide a common platform for collaborative research using shared Grid Computing resources.
In the initial rollout as a proof of concept (PoC), the high speed network was deployed across 17 cities covering the length and breath of the country bring Grid Networked Computing to prominent research labs and industry. The aim of the project was to accelerate the countries drive in turning the substantial research investment into tangible economic benefits GARUDA is a computational Grid offering high end redundant hardware and software infrastructure to provide dependable, consistent, pervasive and inexpensive access to high end computational capabilities.
GARUDA in its initial phase had a total backbone access capacity of 2.4 Gbps connecting 45 niche institutes all over India. GARUDA is a collaboration of science researchers and experimenters on a nationwide grid of computational nodes, mass storage and scientific instruments that aims to provide the technological advances required to enable data and compute intensive science for the 21st century. One of the major challenges of GARUDA involved deployment of appropriate tools and middleware to enable applications to run seamlessly across the grid and strike the right balance between research and deploying the innovation into some of the most complex scientific and engineering endeavours being undertaken. GARUDA is currently being widely used in the field of Bio-Informatics, Seismic, Weather Forecasting, Astronomy, and Earthquake forecasting and monitoring in different applications.
With the aim of boosting scientific and technological excellence in the area of Grid and Peer-to-Peer technologies, GARUDA’s strategic objective ranged from creating a test bed for the research & engineering of technologies, architectures, standards and applications in Grid Computing. Moreover, it brings together all potential research, development and user groups to develop a national initiative on Grid computing, and creates the foundation for the next generation grids by addressing long term research issues in grid computing.
To deliver all this, GARUDA brought together a critical mass of well-established researchers initially from 45 research laboratories and academic institutions of India, who constructed an ambitious program of activities. Firstly, A Pan-Indian communication fabric was rolled out to provide seamless and high-speed access to resources. On top of this was aggregated a range of resources including compute clusters, storage and scientific instruments; together with a range of Grid tools and services to providing an integrated infrastructure to applications and higher-level layers. The user base was driven also, by creating a consortium to collaborate on grid computing and contribute towards the aggregation of resources. Harnessing these distributed resources, the grid is enabled for the deployment of select applications of national importance.
The technology driving Garuda
The major components of GARUDA include the computing resources, high-speed communication fabric, middleware & security mechanisms, tools to support program development, collaborative environments, data management and grid monitoring & management. Access portals and specialized problem solving environments provide a seamless user interface to the Grid.
The GARUDA High-Speed network is a Layer 2/3 MPLS Virtual Private Network (VPN) connecting
institutions across the country at high speeds. This Grid was a precursor to the Gigabit speed nationwide
Wide Area Network (WAN) connecting high performance computing resources and scientific instruments
for seamless collaborative research and experiments. The High Speed Network was established
at all the Garuda partner institutes by ERNET, who is responsible for the operation, maintenance and
management of this network. The Indian Grid Certification Authority(IGCA) provides X.509 certificates
to support the secure environment in grid computing. IGCA is an accredited member of the APgridPMA
(Asia Pacific Grid Policy Management Authority) for Grid Authentication.
Creating collaborations
GARUDA initiated the formation of a virtual community to focus on collaborative projects in specific technology/application domain. The main application domains include Computer Aided Engineering; Earth Sciences; High Energy Physics/Astro Physics; Life Sciences; and Material Sciences / Nano Technology.
In this collaborative grid project, various resources such as high performance computing systems (HPC) and satellite based communication systems have been committed by different centers of C-DAC and GARUDA partners. GARUDA has also made international collaboration. One such initiative is the EU-India Grid linking GARUDA with the European grid EGEE.
Bright Future
With the successful completion of proof of concept, GARUDA has now entered into production phase and looks forward to an exponential expansion of GARUDA with the implementation of the new priority, ‘National Knowledge Network’.
