On the occasion of the Colibri conference, INRIA signs an agreement with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sol (UFRGS) to include its Information Technology Institute within Grid’5000. A fresh direction which will enable users of this experimental platform to explore new avenues in IT research related to the issues of networked computation.

A project launched in 2003 by the French Ministry for Research, INRIA, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS and the French regional councils, Grid’5000 has now reached its objective of exploiting the computational power of over 5,000 core processors to form a the only research platform of its kind. The platform now has 5,026 such processors, spread across nine sites in France. Since this 22 July, 112 others have been added, with the inclusion of the UFRGS IT Institute in Porto Alegre into the Grid’5000 network.

This international expansion represents more than a mere increase in the number of core processors within Grid’5000. It is a technical feat involving connecting computers located each side of the Atlantic, thereby adding an intercontinental dimension to this experimental device for networked computation systems. Distributing the data across the cores and a management system for the computation grids are just two of the new research issues for the Grid’5000 user community raised by the geographical distance between computers in the network.

This community is made up of researchers specialising in the field of massively parallel distributed systems. Grid’5000 is the leading research mechanism in the field. Researchers are using it to test algorithms which could then find application in a “live” grid. This is the case with the Diet software, which runs the Décrypton computation grid (French muscular dystrophy association AFM – CNRS – IBM project). To increase this kind of experimentation and consequently drive forward research into networked computation infrastructures, researchers need to combine and share their computing power, following the lead taken by the Franco-Brazilian agreement signed today.