France Grilles

Vision

France Grilles aims at building and operating a multidisciplinary national Distributed Computing Infrastructure open to all sciences and to developing countries. This DCI should become an open space for collaborations within and across disciplines and organizations. France Grilles was created in 2010 as a Scientific Interest Group by 8 organizations including the French ministry of Research and Higher Education.

Objectives

Operated by CNRS Institut des Grilles et du Cloud, France Grilles main objectives are as follows:

• establish and operate a national production grid infrastructure for high throughput data storage and analysis
• contribute with the other countries involved to the EGI European e-infrastructure
• strengthen synergies and collaborations between teams using the grid for scientific production and doing research on the grid

These objectives are now pursued in the field of cloud computing.

National and International contexts

France Grilles is identified among the Very Large National Research Infrastructures (Très Grandes Infrastructures de Recherche) and represents France within the European Grid Initiative EGI (European Grid Infrastructure) as French National Grid Initiative.

REMINDER: What is a grid ?

Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a “super virtual computer” is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform very large tasks. Since 2000, the emergence of grids has revolutionized many services already offered by the internet because it offers rapid computation, large scale data storage and flexible collaboration by harnessing together the power of a large number of commodity computers or clusters of other basic machines. The grid was devised for use in scientific fields, such as particle physics and bioinformatics, where large volumes of data, or very rapid processing, or both, are necessary.