Short History

Grid activities have been funded in Hungary since 2000 but they were recognised as really important R&D activities only by the beginning of 2003. In March 2003 the five most active Grid centres of Hungary established the Hungarian Grid Competence Centre (MGKK) in order to intensively promote and coordinate high-quality research and development activities in the field of Grid computing at a national level (www.mgkk.hu ). The other main aim of MGKK is to create a knowledge centre in Grid technology where the available critical mass enables the intensive support of establishing and operating nation-wide Grid infrastructures for the benefit of the whole Hungarian academic community. MGKK provides consultancy in Grid computing also for the business and government sectors in order to accelerate the employment of the leading edge Grid technology in companies and governmental institutions.

MGKK is an alliance of the following five Hungarian institutions:

Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (SZTAKI)

Eötvös Loránd University of Science, Budapest (ELTE)

Institute for National Information and Infrastructure Development (NIIFI)

KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (RMKI)

Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME)

In the beginning of 2004 MGKK created a proposal for a national Grid initiative that was discussed by the president and several high-rank officers of the major R&D funding body of Hungary. Though the proposal was welcomed, unfortunately, the economic situation of the country was not suitable at that time to launch such a new national initiative.

Since that time the major R&D funding body was reorganized under the new name National Office for Research and Technology (NKTH) (http://www.nkth.gov.hu/main.php?folderID=775). NKTH has funded four new Grid related projects: MEGA, Data Mining Grid, ADME/Tox-GRID és Service Infrastructure. All these projects put significant effort to enable the use of Grid in business and industrial environments.

The Ministry of Information Technology (IHM) has created a programme for the long-term strategy of the Hungarian e-society. This programme, called as the Hungarian Information Society Strategy (http://www.ihm.gov.hu/data/42303/mits_2003_eng.pdf ), mentions Grid technology explicitly as a major pillar of the programme. IHM plays an ever increasing role in funding Grid activities since 2003 where they started to fund the Hungarian Grid project with the aim of providing the necessary Grid research towards a Hungarian Grid infrastructure. Recently they took over the funding and supervision role of the ClusterGrid initiative. Members of the ministry are expressed their willingness to further support the creation of national Grid vision.

Research initiatives and approaches

There is one Grid infrastructure-oriented national Grid initiative in order to provide a nation-wide Grid infrastructure for the Hungarian higher educational institutions. This initiative was launched by the Ministry of Education (OM) in 2002 and currently funded by IHM. The project is now called as the ClusterGrid project (http://www.clustergrid.niif.hu/ ). It aims to integrate the Intel processor based PC labs of the Hungarian higher educational institutions into a single, large, countrywide interconnected set of clusters. The PCs are provided by participating Hungarian institutes, such as universities, polytechnics or public libraries. The central infrastructure and the coordination are provided by NIIF/HUNGARNET. All the contributors use their PCs for their own purposes (such as educational or office-like purposes) during the official working hours, and offer their infrastructure for high-throughput computation whenever they do not use them, i.e. during the nights and the unoccupied week-ends. The combined use of "day-shift" (i.e. individual mode) and "night-shift" (i.e. grid mode) enables to utilize CPU cycles (which would have been lost anyway) to provide firm computational infrastructure to the national research community. The applied technologies are based on Condor and SGE for task distribution and VPN for security. Currently more than 1400 PCs of 29 clusters are connected from 20 higher educational institutions.

As mentioned before MGKK plays an important role in the coordination of Grid research in Hungary, members of MGKK try to strongly coordinate their R&D activities in order to establish working Grid infrastructures in the country. The relatively large number of Grid research projects that were funded in the framework of different IT-oriented R&D programmes such as the IKTA program organized by the Ministry of Education between 2000 - 2003 and the GVOP program organized by the recently established National Office for Research and Technology (NKTH) were strongly coordinated by MGKK.

Members of MGKK have been participated in nearly all the Hungarian Grid related projects and have been regularly submitted joint project proposals for various R&D programmes. As a result of these Grid projects four different kinds of Grid system have been successfully developed and tested in Hungary:

Hungarian ClusterGrid

HunGrid

JGrid

SZTAKI Desktop Grid

The goals and achievements of the Hungarian ClusterGrid have been described above. HunGrid is the Hungarian VO of the EGEE Grid with some extensions developed as part of the Hungarian Grid research efforts. HunGrid was created in the framework of the Hungarian Grid project funded by IHM and has got about 500 machines from 5 sites and two other sites have already decided to join with another 150 machines. Meanwhile ClusterGrid is a two-shift Grid and has been running since 2003 as an ever increasing production Grid, HunGrid has been providing a 7/24 service since March 2005. JGrid is a 3rd generation service-oriented Grid system developed on top of Jini and was successfully tested by three sites in 2004. Based on the results of the JGrid project (funded by OM) a new service-oriented Grid research project was launched in 2005 with the goal of creating a business-oriented Grid system usable by companies. SZTAKI Desktop Grid developed in the framework of the Hungarian Grid project funded by IHM is a newly created Grid service that can be installed in any universities and research institutes to exploit their PC cycles at any time of the day. The SZTAKI Desktop Grid approach generalizes the Desktop Grid ideas and makes them more scalable and Grid-like than their original versions.

In order to establish these Grid systems a large number of Grid research projects was necessary and these activities led to the creation of significant Grid expertise in the country. The Grid research projects are listed in the “Annex: Projects”. Example research results achieved in various projects include:

Tools and portals for accessing grid resources and services – SuperGrid, SuperCluster Grid, JGrid, Chemistry Grid, EU SEE-GRID

Resource Management and brokering – ClusterGrid, SuperCluster Grid

Monitoring of Grid operations and resource usage – ClusterGrid, DemoGrid, EU GridLab, EU DataGrid

Mobile user support – JGrid, Service Infrastructure

Grid Authorization System – ClusterGrid, HunGrid

Grid accounting – SuperGrid, SuperCluster Grid

Gridifying existing applications – DemoGrid, SuperCluster Grid, Chemistry Grid, Data Mining Grid, ADME/Tox-GRID Grid

Funding Structure and Co-ordination

Recently a new National Innovation System of the Hungarian Government has been established as follows.

In order to speed up economic growth in Hungary, the government is committed to the development and operation of a new, efficient innovation system. This goal can be realised if research and development is driven by the present and future needs of the economy.

To reach this goal, the institutional and legal frameworks have been revised. Consequently, the Science and Technology Policy Board (TTPK) has been established chaired by the Prime Minister. The Vice Presidents of TTPK are the Minister of Education and the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The members are the ministers concerned and the invited member is the President of the National Office for Research and Technology. As the advisory body of TTPK, the Science and Technology Advisory Committee (TTTT) has been set up of distinguished scientists and R&D experts.

Further on, a new government office, the National Office for Research and Technology (NKTH) has been established supervised by the Minister of Education. NKTH is responsible for implementing the government’s science and technology policy. Its duties are to provide a new framework for the national innovation system and to promote research and development that will boost Hungarian economy.

To create a predictable environment for the exploitation of R&D results, the Research and Technology Innovation Fund has been established. The Fund is managed by NKTH. Apart from the micro- and small enterprises, every enterprise is obliged to pay at least 0.25% of its turnover into the Fund. The Hungarian government contributes to the Fund with an equivalent amount. The goal of NKTH is to provide sufficient funding for innovation programs that aim to create innovative services and products. These programs will be simple, transparent and evaluated by independent experts. Representatives of the academic and industrial spheres will submit proposals together.

Under the supervision of NKTH, the Agency for Research Fund Management and Research Exploitation (KPI) is responsible for managing innovation programs. The Research and Technology Innovation Council (KTIT) helps NKTH in developing its innovation strategy (incl. the strategy of using the Fund). Members of the KTIT delegated by ministries responsible for innovation form the minority, while the majority is formed by representatives of the scientific community and industry.

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) is an autonomous public body. Its task is to promote science. In order to achieve this goal, it maintains a special academic research network. The HAS and its institutes are financed by state budget.

The National Innovation System of the Hungarian Government is shown in the figure below.

Links to International and EU activities

The Hungarian Grid projects have been always progressing in close relationship with international and EU projects, and Hungarian researchers and institutes have been involved in many EU Grid projects. The most significant EU collaboration is performed in the framework of the EGEE project in which all the members of MGKK are partners.

Within the framework of the VISSZKI project and the SuperGrid project SZTAKI was in a strong collaboration with the Condor group. As a result of the collaboration we have created a new version of Condor PVM Universe. The original Condor PVM Universe required that only one PVM process could be installed on every Condor PVM resource. The new version is as generic as PVM, i.e., it enables the creation of as many PVM processes as the user wants on every Condor PVM resource.

Another important extension of Condor is related with check-pointing and migration. Condor originally supported only the check-pointing and migration of sequential jobs. As a result of the collaboration P-GRADE and Condor was integrated and in the integrated system any P-GRADE generated PVM program can be check-pointed and the processes of the PVM program or the whole application can be migrated between Condor Grid resources. This new version of Condor was successfully applied in the Hungarian SuperGrid project and demonstrated at several international conferences.

The DemoGrid project was strongly collaborating with EDG and the LHC Grid project of CERN. As a result several Hungarians have been working in CERN on the data management service of EDG, LCG-2 and G-lite Grid middlewares. Hungarians were also involved in the development of the EDG security system.

The Hungarian Grid and SuperGrid projects strongly collaborated with the GridLab project. The GridSphere Grid portal framework was applied in the Hungarian Grid portals and particularly in the P-GRADE portal. The chief-architect of GridSphere, Jason Novotny, has visited SZTAKI for two months in order to strengthen the collaboration. The Mercury Grid monitor developed in the GridLab project is intensively used in the Hungarian Grid projects and particularly it is connected with P-GRADE and the P-GRADE portal.

The Hungarian Chemistry Grid project collaborates with the SIMBEX Chemistry D23 COST project. Italian researchers from Peruggia visited SZTAKI several times for weeks in order to study P-GRADE and the P-GRADE portal.

The Hungarian Grid project strongly collaborates with EGEE. The HunGrid Grid infrastructure developed in the framework of the Hungarian Grid project is based on the EGEE Grid software. Staff members at NIIF work on solving interoperability between the EGEE Grid and the Hungarian ClusterGrid. There is an extremely good working relationship with the European SEEGRID project where SZTAKI leads the work of the middleware workpackage with the help of NIIFI.

The JGrid project has many connections with the international Jini community and with Sun Microsystems.

The Hungarian Grid project strongly collaborates with some UK projects. SZTAKI is an associated partner of the UK e-science OGSA Test-bed project and in the framework of that project the P-GRADE portal developed in the Hungarian Grid project and the GEMLCA Grid legacy code architecture developed in the UK e-science OGSA Test-bed project were successfully integrated and demonstrated at SC04. This collaboration is successfully carried on in the framework of the CoreGrid project. SZTAKI and University of Reading jointly produce the collaborative version of the P-GRADE portal.

Hungarian researchers are actively involved in the CoreGrid project, too with the goal that research results of CoreGrid will be integrated into the Hungarian Grid infrastructure.

Links to Industry and Business

Companies have been involved in the Hungarian Grid projects since 2002 but 2004 was a real turning point in Hungary considering the industry and business aspects of the Grid and the relationship of Hungarian companies to the Grid.

Compaq Hungary Ltd. was involved in the SuperGrid project in 2002-2003 but their participation was rather formal. In 2004 HP Hungary showed real interest in participating in the newly launched NKFP Grid project and they want to play a leading role in the project.

Sun Hungary Ltd. participates in the JGrid project and supports the Hungarian ClusterGrid activity. They helped NIIFI to participate in the international Grid R&D activity of Sun Microsystems.

Although IBM Hungary did not participate directly in any Hungarian Grid projects they have sponsored several Grid-related events in Hungary and they have expressed their interest in future Grid activities as well.

T-Com, the largest Hungarian telco, has been showing significant interest in Grid technology since April 2004. They contracted SZTAKI to create their Grid prototype system by the end of 2004.

Comgenex Ltd., a biotechnology company, is also interested in applying Grid technology to support their molecule development and production system. Together with SZTAKI they started an R&D Grid project in 2005 funded by NKTH.

T-Com and AAM are interested in the integration of data mining and Grid technologies. They formed a R&D consortium with SZTAKI and Univ. of Szeged in 2005 to start an R&D Grid project funded by NKTH.

MGKK has organized a Grid Dissemination Day jointly with the Association of the Hungarian Industrial Companies (IVSZ). The main subject of the meeting was the discussion of the proposal for a national Grid programme written by MGKK (as it was mentioned before). The representatives of IVSZ welcomed the proposal and expressed a great lot of interest.

Future Activities

There is no official national roadmap for Grid-related activities in Hungary at the moment but members of MGKK work together with high-rank officers of IHM and directors of the Hungarian Telecom in order to develop a long-term Grid vision for the Country and to guarantee that Grid-related activities will go on in an organized and coordinated manner in the whole country. The future activities will be based on the current Hungarian Grid infrastructure, the European Grid infrastructure efforts (mainly EGEE and SEEGRID activities), the current Hungarian Grid projects that are connected with European Grid projects as well as some further extensions of the industrial, business and governmental applications.

The vision is that three production Grid infrastructures will be built and maintained in Hungary:

The Hungarian ClusterGrid infrastructure

The EGEE-based HunGrid infrastructure

A SETI-like infrastructure (SZTAKI Desktop Grid)

All these will be interoperable forming together the overall Hungarian Grid system. The Hungarian ClusterGrid infrastructure will basically provide services for universities basically during the night and the weekends. The EGEE-based HunGrid infrastructure basically will serve the large research projects of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the universities and it will operate continuously 24 hours per day. The SETI-like infrastructure will be used both for industrial and academic projects. A unified Grid portal like the P-GRADE portal can hide the Grid details from the end-users and these Grids can work in a transparent manner for the end-users.

We have done the first steps towards industrial and business Grid systems. Currently Sun Hungary, HP Hungary and Hungarian Telecom show significant interest to continue R&D activity in this field and produce commercial Grid services. The current results of the JGrid, SuperGrid and Hungarian Grid projects represent a good starting point for such industrial and business Grid systems. Hungarian Telecom is particularly engaged in establishing a Grid-based service in the country in the long-term.

The European results should be actively included into the future plans of Hungarian Grid activities as it was done in the past. We are particularly interested in using the results of the EGEE and CoreGrid projects in the future Hungarian Grid systems.

Annex: Projects

The table below summarizes projects related to Grid which have been funded by Hungarian funding agencies. It is necessarily a partial list, due to the different funding sources.



Project name

Coordinating institution

URL

VISSZKI

MTA SZTAKI

http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/index.php?load=projects/completed/ni2000.php

DemoGrid

Eötvös Lóránd Univ. of Science

http://www.caesar.elte.hu/eltenet/projects/demogrid/index.html

SzuperGrid

NIIFI

http://www.iif.hu/mszgrid/

ClusterGrid

NIIFI

http://www.clustergrid.iif.hu/

JGrid

Univ. of Veszprém

http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/index.php?load=projects/current/ikta5-089.php

Chemistry Grid

MTA SZTAKI

http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/index.php?load=projects/current/ikta5-137.php

SuperCluster Grid

MTA SZTAKI

http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/index.php?load=projects/current/supercluster.php

Hungarian Grid

MTA SZTAKI

http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/index.php?load=projects/current/dhgs.php

MEGA

Budapest University of Technology and Economics

http://mega.ik.bme.hu

Data Mining Grid

MTA SZTAKI

N/A

ADME/Tox-GRID

Comgenex Ltd.

http://www.admetoxgrid.com/

Service Infrastructure

Univ. of Veszprém

http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/index.php?load=projects/current/jgrid2.php