The Interactive European Grid project (contract number 031857) started on 1 May, 2006 and will last for 24 months. The work takes place with the financial support of the European Community and identifies the Specific Research Program.

The objective of the project is the deployment of an advanced Grid empowered infrastructure in the European Research Area specifically oriented to support the execution of interactive demanding applications.

While guaranteeing interoperability with existing large e-Infrastructures like EGEE by providing basic common middleware services, the initiative will exploit the expertise generated by the EU CrossGrid project to provide researchers an interactive and simultaneous access to large distributed facilities through a friendly interface with powerful visualization.

The Interactive European Grid will focus on the support for remote interactive collaboration and the reinforcement of the global framework for operation of virtual organizations for research projects in areas like biomedicine, astronomy, environment, or physics.

The infrastructure operation will benefit from certification and active security policies, and will include support for significant powerful architectures like multiprocessor or large RAM machines.

The consortium involves 13 leading institutions in 7 countries, with significant computing capacity and expertise in Grid technology.

TCD will engage in the creation of the new infrastructure, and will also lead the effort on active security.

TCD Contacts: Brian Coghlan (Primary) and Stuart Kenny (Technical)

TCD Infrastructure

Connectivity: Site bandwidth available to the testbed 1 Gbits/s provided by the Irish NREN (HEANET), with a 2.5 Gbit/s forward connection to Geant.

Contact: crossgrid-mgr[at]cs.tcd.ie

Active Security

The Active Security task, part of the Joint Research Activity, proposes to consider security measures for an interactive framework, and subsequently to enhance interactive operation with active security tools. Distributed active security will be included in the architecture from the start, adding to the security mechanisms of the EGEE middleware. By active security we mean dynamic, rather than static, measures that track grid interactions and respond to unwanted security events in an adaptive way. It requires both extended security monitoring and tracking, and a good deal of automatic coordination of this across a number of security tools and all the sites involved in the events. Auditing of relevant actions will be integral. The intent is to track and resolve security issues as they occur. Although it must facilitate the various different types of grid access patterns, from single transactions to long-term batch jobs, it will be particularly cognisant of interactive jobs.

User Survey

This User Questionnaire is one of the initiatives undertaken in the framework of the dissemination activity of the Interactive European Grid project. An online version of the questionnaire is also available here. Details of the applications, tools, and services available from int.eu.grid can be found here. The questionnaire is also available in several languages from the dissemination website.