On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 01:16:13PM -0600 or thereabouts, Santiago Nu?ez wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> A couple of months ago some people here began to think about enabling a
> national
> e-science infrastructure to aid researchers in their tasks. The main
> objetive is
> to make a definite step for basic and applied science using high-performance
> computing and setting up the basement for Grid integration.

There is some Costa Rica envolvment in EGEE already I believe. Are you in
contact with EGEE? There is certainly some South American envolement.

http://www.cern.ch/egee

 Steve


> 
> Well, things have gone very fast here with respect to clusters and we have
> come
> to a point where the grid becomes necessary. Now, in this field our
> experience
> is limited and we'd like some advice from people that have worked closely
> with
> grid models at many levels. I thought that I could ask some help based on
> your
> experience and work in the grid realms.
> 
> We discovered that many, many people are interested in computational
> resource
> sharing and there are lots of applications suitable for the initiative.
> Also, we
> have at our full disposal a high-speed fiber optic interconnection linking
> the
> four national main universities, which enables a huge bandwidth that's been
> underused till now. In the present time, some funding has become available
> and
> the initial project has sufficient critical mass due to success achieved in
> the
> past months.
> 
> Having this technological landscape, we had a meeting and decided to start
> the
> national grid project. In CR, there's one person which has direct experience
> in
> grids, he is Ph.D. Cesar Garita and his doctoral thesis was involved with
> VO's
> establishment in The Netherlands. Currently he is directing the School of
> Computer Engineering at the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (ITCR) and
> his
> time is quite short. In addition to our cluster (National Center for High
> Technology), we found some others that were hidden under the hood and had
> few
> projection in the local scientific community; now they will become a small
> grid
> with a third cluster in construction. They are part of the grid picture too.
> A
> fourth recent cluster at ITCR is also making the first steps.
> 
> Let's go to the point. There are some elements which we need some advice (I
> know
> your time is also limited) or some contacts that may be interested in giving
> some help. Currently we can't finance anyone to be here but key ideas are
> important, particularly to learn from errors that happened in similar
> circumstances.
> 
> These are the areas:
> 
> - Technical aspects of grid infrastructure. Here the concern is to implement
> a
> low-cost solution, without trimming too much functionality and ensuring
> scalability.
> - Definition of the workflow model of computations.
> - Definition of administrative policies and processes.
> - Implementation of logistics and coordination for e-science activities
> (this is
> the priority)
> - Implementation of logistics and coordination for business activities
> - Cost management of services (the economic model for universities and
> research
> institutes)
> - Definition of roles, resposibilities and norms.
> 
> I know that all of them are wide topics, all of them with their own
> subproblems
> and entire research activities. The initiative has a lot of strength and we
> don't want lose this inertia, so the hard part begins right now.
> 
> The other person involved with this strategy is Ph.D. José Castro
> ([log in to unmask]).
> 
> Thanks and if you have any questions or ideas, just write back.
> 
> 
> Santiago Núñez Corrales
> 
> Co-coordinator, National Grid and Cluster Computing Strategy
> Computing and Advanced Informatics Reserach Center
> National Center for High Technology

-- 
Steve Traylen
[log in to unmask]
http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/