D-Grid

The D-Grid Initiative (German Grid Initiative) was a government project to fund computer infrastructure for education and research (e-Science) in Germany. It uses the term grid computing. D-Grid started September 1, 2005 with six community projects and an integration project (DGI) as well as several partner projects.

The D-Grid integration project intended to integrate community projects. The D-Grid integration project acted as a service provider for the science community in Germany. The project office is located at the Institute for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe. The resources to ensure a sustainable Grid infrastructure are provided by four work packages:

Six community projects participated in the D-Grid Initiative:

AstroGrid-D, also referred to as the German Astronomy Community Grid (GACG), is a joint research project of thirteen astronomical institutes and grid-oriented computer science groups, supported by supercomputing centers. The main objective of AstroGrid-D is the integration of German research facilities into a unified nationwide research infrastructure in the field of astronomy. The goal is to improve the efficiency and usability of hardware and software resources including computer clusters, astronomical data archives, and observational facilities such as robotic telescopes. AstroGrid-D supports the standards of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) and cooperates closely with international projects on grid development.

AstroGrid-D is managed by the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP).

At the Collaborative Climate Community Data and Processing Grid (C3-Grid) scientific researchers are trying to understand the earth system including their subsystems like oceans, atmosphere and biosphere. For the last decades the amount of data has increased enormously in the field of climate research. On the one hand, due to rapid rise in computing power scientists are now able to use models with higher resolution and perform long term simulations. The scientists are able to couple models for the mentioned subsystems in complex cumulative simulations producing petabytes of output which is collected in distributed data archives. On the other hand, monitoring the earth with satellites results in a second huge data stream for climate research. Up to now, no uniform access to these distributed data is available what creates a bottleneck for the scientific research. The C3-Grid proposes to link these distributed data archives.

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