Project director: Dr. Imre Szeberényi Ph.D., associate professor, BME CIT

The evolution of global distributed IT systems is due to the rapid development of data transmission alternatives. Within these systems the on-demand usage of IT resources (like processing and storage capacity) and services (like searching and computing services) can be realised, and this can lead to a much more efficient resource management. In the first place, the demands for sharing and efficiently utilising resources have emerged primarily for scientific research tasks. The main reason for this is the massive scale of collaboration of many researchers and institutes when engaging in high volume projects. Contributing and the sharing of resources have become natural and logical during cooperation. The demand for wide range resource sharing and connection started so called Grid research and the worldwide experiments surrounding it.

Nowadays the requirement for using shared, dynamic, on-demand IT resources has become a standard in most aspects of life. This is due to the simple recognition that IT application services are manifest for the mass of end-users just as other services like the power grid, the sewage system, or laundry services. As the palette of IT service users widens, the specific details of technical solutions become uninteresting for more and more users.

The reorientation of distributed IT systems towards becoming user and service oriented is presently a challenge. This task brings on a great deal of unresolved technical and technological problems, such as load balancing, security and authentication problems, reliability and quality of service questions, etc.

The experimental results strengthen the prognosis that the Grid research supported significantly worldwide cannot be separated from Web-technology, moreover according to the results so far, the Grid may be Web-technology’s new generation. However, the possibilities of Web-technology enhance the creation of easy-to-use user interfaces, which greatly contribute to the industrial usage and spread of the results.

The subtasks to be realised by the project team are to bolster the industrial usage and spread of Grid technology. The subtask connected to the distributed, extended file systems, consists of examining the usage possibilities and requirements in the Grid environment of the scalable storage devices made by our industrial partners. The goal of this subtask is to achieve the appropriate modifications and settings in order to create a product which becomes a stable basic of the Grid infrastructure.

The subtask connected to resolve the planning tasks with high computing needs consists of developing a specific industrial application. The final achievement is a service based on the Grid infrastructure, and is able to contribute to executing the daily planning tasks of the industrial partner. Usage of this application would make the planning and construction of pre-stressed, reinforced concrete bridge beams much faster and effective.

The industrial widespread use of Grid systems has been greatly reduced by the absence of trust in the built-in security systems. But security is a very important question in examining every IT system. The objective measurement of security is a great challenge for the developers and also for the procurer. By completing the third subtask, a security laboratory will be deployed. This laboratory will contribute to solving the security problems of the BME(IT)2 projects.