ITR/AP: An International Virtual-Data Grid Laboratory for Data Intensive Science

The computational GRID vision is that everyone at a desktop machine could eventually have the power of a supercomputer at his or her fingertips. The GRID takes its name from the electrical utility analogy.

GRID computing holds the promise of transforming the Internet, now used for communication, mainly e- mail and instant messaging, while the Web is an information retrieval system, enabling computer users to have access to text, images and music. Grid computing builds on the result of previous and ongoing research in networking, distributed computing, seamless computing, meta computing, web technologies, and other related topics.

In this proposal, the National Virtual Observatory, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Large Hadron Collider experiments, all well-presented science projects (two of which have support via NSF Major Research Equipment funds) have data needs appropriate for GRID based technologies and are depending on such technologies for the successful operations of their experiments. The experiments will serve as test beds for GRID concepts.