DEISA: Distributed European Infraestructures for Supercomputing Applications

Description

DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications) brought together a consortium of leading national supercomputing centres aiming to support pan-European, world-class computer-science research.

The aim of the first phase of the DEISA project, funded under the European Commission's FP6 programme, was to implement and operate a lasting, production-quality, distributed supercomputing environment across the whole continent. It aimed to deliver a turnkey operational solution for a future European HPC ecosystem. In addition, by extending the European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing, DEISA was intended to pave the way towards the implementation and operation of a lasting, cooperative European HPC ecosystem, as suggested by ESFRI (the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures).

DEISA's infrastructure was based on linking eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries, using the dedicated network interconnections of GÉANT2, the high-bandwidth, academic internet serving Europe’s research and education community, and NRENs (National Research and Education Networks).

The DEISA consortium aimed to consolidate existing HPC infrastructure and services. It also sought to extend and enhance activities and services relevant to Application Enabling, Operations, and Technologies, as these were considered indispensable for the effective support of computational sciences in the area of supercomputing. In addition, DEISA set out to extend the service provisioning model towards the inclusion of non-localised Virtual Science Communities; accordingly, collaborative activities were undertaken with other European and international initiatives.