GRIA

At the heart of many our current Grid projects is GRIA, which is Grid middleware developed by IT Innovation to enable commercial use of the Grid in a secure, interoperable and flexible manner. GRIA is free and open source, and is available from the GRIA website.

GRIA was originally developed during the EC IST GRIA project (Grid Resources for Industrial Application, 2001-2004, co-ordinated by IT Innovation) to address the goal of making the Grid usable by industry. No existing Grid middleware could do this. Users want to be able to access Grid resources in minutes rather than weeks in the presence of firewalls and network administrators. They need mutual authentication between sites, and well-defined business processes that allow management of trust and quality of service. Industrial users also want a system that gives well-managed authorisation to remote users.

To address these needs we used off-the-shelf Web Services technology rather than existing systems like Globus. We designed services to manage jobs and data storage, subject to negotiated quality of service, for trusted B2B customers. Users have access only to pre-defined services, and authorisation is based on process-based access control - a dynamic authorisation approach based on Grid identity with no local account mappings, with delegation built into services rather than authentication mechanisms. This combination of features allowed the GRIA project to meet its goals: users can join a GRIA network of trust very rapidly, and network administration overheads are extremely low, yet every computation and data transfer is subject to a well-defined security policy and quality-of-service allocation.

Shortly after GRIA began, the wider Grid community also turned to Web Services with the launch of OGSA in early 2002, and ever since the worlds of Grid and Web Services have been converging. This makes it easier for network administrators to trust our increasingly off-the-shelf, firewall-friendly middleware.

As well as secure Grid middleware, the IST GRIA project yielded business processes, services and marketplaces for B2B out-sourcing, in-sourcing and collaboration.

Structural Identification

CESI (Centro Elettrotecnico Sperimentale Italiano) have developed specialised methods for creating accurate models of old structures, by vibrating the structure and matching a finite element model to the measurements. This technique is used by them to assess and operate old hydroelectric dams, and also to maintain historical (Roman and Medieval) monuments in Italy.

Structural identification requires large numbers of finite element calculations, which far exceeds the computational resources CESI can justify owning for everyday use. GRIA provides a solution by enabling CESI to outsource finite element calculations to third-party computing resources, while offering their unique computational methods as a service to others over the Grid.

Virtual DigitalStudio

KINO is a leading TV and movie post-production company in Greece. They specialize in commercials, and are promoting the 2004 Olympic Games.

KINO use digital post-production methods which are both computationally and data intensive. However, like ENEL they find they don't need large-scale computing resources every day, and so cannot justify owning the facilities needed to use digital methods routinely. Furthermore, a complete movie production usually involves numerous artistic and production companies, so it doesn't make sense for KINO to hold all the data in-house.

GRIA addressed these issues by providing the means to set up a "virtual" digital studio that can be set up among companies working on a project, and can use third-party data silos and computational power stations.

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The GRIA project received research funding from the EC’s IST Programme.