DEISA Concept and Objectives

DEISA2 continues to support and develop the distributed high performance computing infrastructure in Europe. The consortium is consolidating the existing DEISA infrastructure and extending its collaborative environment for capability computing and data management. The DEISA infrastructure is unmatched world-wide in its underlying heterogeneity and complexity. A major task is the federated operation of the powerful European HPC infrastructure built on top of national services. This specific e-infrastructure will facilitate Europe’s world-leading computational science research.

DEISA1, the previous project funded by the European Commission in the sixth Framework Programme, has proved its relevance for advancing computational sciences in leading scientific and industrial disciplines within Europe.

DEISA1 and now DEISA2, funded in FP7, are paving the way towards the deployment of a cooperative European HPC ecosystem.

Towards a European HPC Infrastructure:  The HPC ecosystem integrates national supercomputing facilities (T1) and powerful supra-national HPC centers (T0). 

The existing infrastructure is based on the tight coupling of eleven leading national Supercomputing centres, using dedicated network interconnections of GÉANT2 and the National Research and Educational Network providers (NRENs).
In DEISA2, activities and services concerning Applications Enabling, Operation, and Technologies are continued and enhanced, as these are indispensable for the effective support of computational sciences in the area of Supercomputing.
The service provisioning model is extended from support dedicated projects to one that serves Virtual Science Communities. Therefore, collaborative activities with new European and other international initiatives will be expedited by DEISA2. Owing to its complementary aims, DEISA2 is closely cooperating with the PRACE initiative that is preparing for the installation of few leadership-class Tier-0 Supercomputers in Europe.

Among the primary aims of DEISA is the delivery of a turnkey operational solution for a future persistent European HPC ecosystem, as suggested by ESFRI. This ecosystem will integrate national Tier-1 centres and the new powerful Tier-0 centres.

A two-fold strategy is applied:

• Consolidation of the existing DEISA infrastructure by guaranteeing the continuity of those activities and services that currently contribute to the effective support of world-leading computational science in Europe.

• Evolution of this European infrastructure towards a robust and persistent European HPC ecosystem, by enhancing the existing services, by deploying new services including support for European Virtual Communities, and by cooperating and collaborating with new European initiatives, especially PRACE that will enable shared European PetaFlop/s supercomputer systems.