ACADEMIA

Grids are about to take flight in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. São Paulo State University (UNESP) has just received funding for a supercomputing grid infrastructure that will link many of its campuses, to the benefit of researchers across the state. GridUNESP will supply computing resources for researchers in physics, biology and bioinformatics, geosciences and engineering and many other disciplines. "UNESP has several research areas of excellence that demand a great deal of computing power and large amounts of data," says project coordinator Sérgio Novaes. "I believe that GridUNESP will provide the necessary means to improve even more our performance in these areas." Because UNESP's campuses are distributed throughout an area equivalent in size to the United Kingdom, a grid infrastructure is the best solution to enable a homogeneous distribution of resources across the university. The GridUNESP project will deploy processing centers in different cities of the state of São Paulo and integrate them through a grid architecture. This implementation will aggregate existing resources, optimizing their use and increasing the overall computing power of UNESP. "São Paulo State University has its campus distributed all over Sao Paulo state, and the grid infrastructure is the most cost effective solution to integrate the scattered computing resources and make it available to all," says technical coordinator Eduardo Gregores. The project is made possible by funding from the Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, a financing agency within the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology. FINEP has recently approved approximately $2 million for the implementation of GridUNESP, making it the largest single project approved in the FINEP ProInfra program that improves the research infrastructure of all Brazilian universities. Besides its importance for the scientific and technological development of the state of São Paulo, GridUNESP will integrate the university's computing resources into international grid initiatives such as the Open Science Grid. The project will also foster a strong human resource training program on information technology. The implementation of GridUNESP will start with the deployment of a central cluster directly linked to the AMPATH network that connects the São Paulo academic network and the U.S. Internet2. Seven other clusters will then be deployed in cities throughout the state to complete the grid infrastructure. For more information please visit its Web site. —Sergio Novaes, São Paulo State University