EELA-2 project connects OurGrid to gLite over EDGeS Bridge

Scientists can now use both Grids in their applications

The EELA-2 project has created a Bridge that connects the OurGrid middleware to gLite, the middleware that is also used by the large European EGEE Grid. This OurGrid-gLite Bridge is an implementation of the EDGeS 3G Bridge. Thanks to the new bridge, scientists in Latin-America can now seamlessly submit jobs to both Grids.  When they do not have enough computing capacity on the gLite part of the EELA-2 e-infrastructure they can use the OurGrid resources.

 OurGrid is a peer-to-peer based Desktop Grid middleware that is used to share computers amongst peers. Jobs can run on computers that have spare computing time. OurGrid takes care this is handled in a fair way, and computer owners always have access to the full capacity of their own system when needed.

OurGrid is widely used. Currently it connects about 1,000 computers of the Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG) Institutional Grid in Brazil, which is part of the EELA-2 e-infrastructure. This complements the service part of the EELA-2 e-infrastructure that comprises over 3000 computers connected with gLite. EELA-2 is a project to support the collaboration between scientists in Latin-America and Europe by providing them with a shared computing infrastructure. Scientists all over  Latin-America and Europe use the EELA-2 e-infrastructure. There are over 60 applications that are running on EELA.

The EDGEeS 3G Bridge was already running, bridging between BOINC or XtremWeb based Desktop Grids and gLite based EGEE. This bridging created the largest computational infrastructure in Europe: It connected EGEE with about 150.000 processors, with several Desktop Grids (SZTAKI Desktop Grid, IberCivis, AlmereGrid, and several local Desktop Grids) with about 100.000 computers.

 "The EELA-2 result shows the EDGeS Bridge design is sound enough for others to write plugins for. This is a big step towards seamless integration of different infrastructures into one pan-European computational Grid", said Peter Kascuk EDGeS project manager.

"Implementing the EDGeS 3G Bridge proved to be very easy. The new bridge will help our scientists with getting more computational resources for their applications when they need it", said Francisco Brasileiro, lead researcher of the OurGrid project and manager of the joint research activity of the EELA-2 project.

More information is available on the EDGeS website at http://edges-grid.eu/ and on the EELA-2 website at http://www.eu-eela.eu/.