The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which consists of 11 of Europe's major supercomputers, is boosting connectivity speeds between all of its sites 10-fold to 10 Gbit/s. It uses dedicated links designed and deployed by the GÉANT2 pan-European research and education network.
This upgrade will allow researchers in projects such as SEISSOL, for research into earthquake simulations, and COMSIMM, looking at current and future climate trends, to harness the combined processing power of DEISA's 200 teraflops of supercomputing infrastructure. Requests for supercomputing resources in scientific research domains are on the increase, with 23 projects scheduled for operation in 2007. Among these applications, projects in progress include ICAROS, for stratospheric ozone research and climate change, gyro3d, for plasma instability studies, and HELIUM for radiation–matter interactions.
GÉANT2 connects 34 countries on the continent and has extensive links to North America and Asia. Europe's National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and the European Commission co-fund it, and the international research and education network provider, DANTE, provides the management.
GÉANT2 and its partner NRENs already connect seven DEISA sites across Europe – BSC (Spain), IDRIS (France), FZJ, HLRS, LRZ, RZG (all Germany) and SARA (the Netherlands) – via dedicated 10 Gbit/s wavelengths, all managed by a central switch. Thanks to an upgrade this year, the remaining sites, including CINECA (Italy), CSC, the Finnish IT centre for science (Finland), EPCC (UK) and ECMWF (UK), are also being connected at 10 Gbit/s.
DEISA provides leading scientific researchers with access to a European cluster of state-of-the-art high-performance computing (HPC) resources. The "private network" of point-to-point links deployed by GÉANT2 will enable researchers to gain faster and more efficient access to DEISA's shared file system. DEISA's aim is to create an integrated European "HPC ecosystem" before the end of the decade.