Workshops in India: global science up close

(Posted for Bob Jones, EGEE project director)

Last week I had the opportunity of observing global science from the other side of the globe. I was in New Delhi attending two workshops: the EU-INDIA workshop hosed by the Indian National Science Academy and the EU-IndiaGrid2 Kickoff Workshop at the Indian Institute of Technology.

At these meetings representatives from European and Indian research compared approaches to building and maintaining e-Infrastructures and sought areas ripe for collaboration.
India and the European Union have cooperated on science and technology through formal agreements for the last 10 years. India currently has links to CERN, is a member of ITER—the fusion research project—and is invited to be involved in the Research Infrastructures defined in the ESFRI roadmap (learn more about the roadmap in 25 November 2009 edition of International Science Grid this Week).

To increase the capacity of its current e-Infrastructure, India is establishing a National Knowledge Network (NKN), which is essentially an upgrade of the network backbone that will be extended to all the research and education establishments across India. Its roll-out has started and the existing EGEE and GARUDA (the national grid infrastructure) sites will be migrated to NKN. The plans for the EC co-funded TEIN3 network link to Europe were also presented. In terms of supercomputing, India assembles its own clusters using commercial off the shelf components but has no equivalent of DEISA/PRACE (the European supercomputing infrastructure).

At the close of the day the Indian National Academy and EC representatives summarised briefly the areas for future collaboration and said they would be submitting a written set of recommendations to their superiors. The most likely areas for collaboration are solar energy and fusion research.

At the second workshop, the one day EU-IndiaGrid2 kick-off meeting the project coordinator Alberto Masoni highlighted that the project will not build an infrastructure itself but act as a bridge between the Indian and European infrastructures. A roadmap milestone is scheduled for the first quarter of the project which should outline how India will interact with EGI.

Watch this space for more updates.

(Image of the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib Sikh Temple in New Delhi courtesy of youngrobv. All rights reserved.)