SCIENCE

The EU-funded DEGISCO project aimed at setting up Desktop Grids for International Scientific Collaboration, has released the first version of a Desktop Grids for eScience Road Map on January 31, 2011. The document, produced for the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) is comprised of two parts. The first part constitutes a bird view of all the relevant topics to be considered when setting up a Desktop Grid infrastructure. This management part is addressed to political stakeholders and the general public. The second part offers a detailed and step-by-step description in five chapters of all the challenges and issues to be solved including relevant links to background information and practical examples. This technical part is aimed at Desktop Grid operators, scientific users, the academic user community, legal experts, and volunteer computing organisations.

DEGISCO is a two-year project that was launched on June 1, 2010. The main objective is to expand European Distributed Computing Infrastructures into ICPC countries by supporting the creation of new Desktop Grids for e-Science in those countries and in Europe and by interconnecting them using the EDGeS bridge technology. DEGISCO will support applications on this expanded infrastructure, and disseminate, promote and provide training about this expanded infrastructure and its usage.

One of the dissemination tasks in the project is the production of a Road Map for parties that want to set up a Desktop Grid infrastructure. The newly issued first version of this Road Map will serve as a basis for a consultation round among the interested parties and stakeholders. The DEGISCO project partners expect to collect a large amount of useful feedback through the answers to the questions of the survey that accompanies the first Road Map version. This will help the project team to produce a revised second version of the Road Map by June 2011. As such, the Road Map document should be seen as a process that will amount to a real guide for setting up a Desktop Grid infrastructure in a diverse range of environments.

The chosen procedure will guarantee that all stakeholders and interested parties are continuously and actively involved in the evolution of the DEGISCO Road Map process. The interaction between the Road Map editors and readers will provide a fruitful basis for permanent collaboration in order to create a realistic and comprehensive guide for Desktop Grid Computing to help eScience. The ultimate goal indeed is to support eScience research and projects with a sustainable, economic, high-performance but environment-friendly computing infrastructure.