The National Grid Computing Initiative GARUDA is a collaboration of science researchers and experimenters on a nation wide grid of computational nodes, mass storage and scientific instruments that aims to provide the technological advances required to enable data and compute intensive science for the 21st century. One of GARUDA's most important challenges is to strike the right balance between research and the daunting task of deploying that innovation into some of the most complex scientific and engineering endeavors being undertaken today.

	Building Grids for India
	Garuda Proof of Concept (PoC) Network
	Garuda Objective
	What is Computational Grid?

Building Grids for India

Building a commanding position in Grid computing is crucial for India. By allowing anyone, anywhere, anytime to easily access supercomputer level processing power and knowledge resources, grids will underpin progress in Indian science, engineering and business. The challenge facing India today is to turn technologies developed for researchers into industrial strength business tools.

The Department of Information Technology (DIT) has funded the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to deploy the nation-wide computational grid 'GARUDA' which will connect 17 cities across the country in its Proof of Concept phase (PoC) with an aim to bring "Grid" networked computing to research labs and industry. GARUDA will accelerate India's drive to turn its substantial research investment into tangible economic benefits.

GARUDA PoC Network

The GARUDA network is a Layer 2/3 MPLS Virtual Private Network {VPN} connecting select institutions at 10/100 Mbps with stringent quality and Service Level Agreements. This Grid is a pre-cursor to the next generation Gigabit speed Wide Area Network nationwide with high performance computing resources and scientific instruments for seamless collaborative research and experiments.

GARUDA Objective

GARUDA aims at strengthening and advancing scientific and technological excellence in the area of Grid and Peer-to-Peer technologies. To achieve its objective, GARUDA brings together a critical mass of well-established researchers, from 45† research laboratories and academic institutions, who have constructed an ambitious program of activities.

To ensure progressive evolution and durable integration, GARUDA is managed by C-DAC with the Grid monitoring Centre at Bangalore and structured around complementary research areas that have been selected on the basis of their strategic importance, research challenges and the existing C-DAC expertise to build and engineer grid middleware and services.

GARUDA will also create the foundation for the next generation grids by addressing long term research issues in the strategic areas of knowledge and data management, programming models, architectures, grid management and monitoring, problem solving environments, tools and grid services.

Access to the GARUDA network and resources will be through a grid portal managed by C-DAC wherein, the users will have the option to choose from a fastest response to their task requests or deploying as many available computational nodes to their tasks or simply submitting job requests on a best effort mode of operation.

What is a computational grid?

A computational grid is an aggregation of heterogeneous and geographically distributed resources such as computing, storage and special equipments. The aim of the grid is to dynamically share resources to facilitate optimal utilisation. Grid allows us to solve complex problems that could not be dealt with otherwise. It provides high-speed and seamless access to supercomputers and also enables creation and management of dynamic virtual collaborations and organisations.