Research Projects

NICE Research Projects

NICE believes and invests in Research, working with Government and Academic institutions to face the IT challenges that science and engineering pose - and to stay connected to the leading-edge of ICT technology and scientific developments.

NICE participates as an active protagonist in several funded research projects:

EGEE

Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) is the largest multi-disciplinary grid infrastructure in the world, which brings together more than 120 organizations to produce a reliable and scalable computing resource available to the European and global research community. At present, it consists of 250 sites in 48 countries and more than 68,000 CPUs available to some 8,000 users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. EGEE-III, co-funded by the European Commission, aims to expand and optimize the Grid infrastructure, which currently processes more than 150, 000 jobs per day from scientific domains ranging from biomedicine to fusion science.
NICE contributed to the development of GENIUS Grid Portal and EnginFrame products to make them compatible with the EGEE middleware gLite.

For more information about Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project and its aims, objectives and results go to www.eu-egee.org.

DEISA

DEISA is a project connecting eleven of the largest HPC centres in Europe. Since its deployment on DEISA, NICE EnginFrame became one the most widely deployed Grid gateways on such an infrastructure, mainly for Biotech applications and Research.
NICE EnginFrame contributed to the project in order to create a Web front-end and increase usability of the Life Science gateway, without facing the complexity that is normally associated with HPC infrastructures in heterogeneous environments.
Moreover, research projects like DEISA rely on NICE EnginFrame to allow easy and transparent use of computing resources without any insight of the HPC infrastructure, a key factor for scientific end-users.

For more information about the DEISA project and its aims, objectives and results go to www.deisa.org.

BEinGRID

NICE is a partner in business Experiment 18 - BE18 Seismic Processing and Reservoir Simulation. The aim of the experiment is to validate the technical and economic viability of geo-science processing on the Grid by consolidating the EGEODE (Expanding Geosciences On Demand). EGEODE is a Virtual Organization, opened to Research Centers in geophysics and other geosciences from both Industrial (public-private) and Academic world, focused on the oil & gas application domain..

For more information about BEinGRID go to www.beingrid.com.

A-WARE

A team composed by five partners (Airbus, Fujitsu, Cineca, FzUrlich, and NICE ) developed a stable, supported, commercially exploitable, high quality technology project named A-WARE, with the aim of giving easy access to Grid resources. The project output was based on the NICE EnginFrame Grid portal and on Unicore/GS technologies. The guiding principle of the project was to exploit and leverage the maturity of the Unicore/GS software components, developing a technology to broaden the adoption of Grid technology, via a web thin-client approach based on user-friendly interfaces, thereby hiding the complexity of the underlying Grid middleware to occasional as well as frequent users. More, a workflow tool allows to manage the different engineering processes.

For more information about A-WARE project go to www.a-ware-project.eu.

UnoSat

UNOSAT is a Cern, Geneve University, and United Nations program created to provide the international community and developing countries with enhanced access to satellite images and Geographic Information System (GIS) services. These tools are used mainly in humanitarian relief, disaster prevention and post crisis reconstruction.
NICE has been actively collaborating with UNOSAT since 2006, in the following UNOSAT activities: Creation of the Grid Portal, and development of portal services for managing and controlling the Job Submission, and the related Monitoring services.

For more information about UNOSAT go to www.unosat.org.

NESSI

NESSI (Networked European Software and Services Initiative) is the European Technology Platform dedicated to Software and Services.
There are many definitions of service used in different contexts. However, all are based on the same principle: a service consumer does not own the service and therefore need not be concerned with all the aspects generally associated with ownership such as infrastructure, technology, integration and maintenance. Instead the user has only to choose a service which meets his business needs.

For more information about NESSI go to www.nessi-europe.com.

TriGrid

TriGrid provides the Sicilian Region with a Virtual Laboratory grid-powered, for scientific and industrial applications. It delivers an e-infrastructure of distributed computation and storage-on-demand (the first in Italy on a regional scale) that it is “open”, general purpose, and connected to the international computational grids.

For more information about Trigrid project go to www.trigrid.it.

CYBERSAR

The CYBERSAR (Cyber-infrastructure for technological and scientific research in Sardinia) project aims to set up an advanced cyber-infrastructure based on dedicated optical networks to support collaborative research applications. In particular, CYBERSAR studies techniques for processing and rendering very large scale 3D datasets on innovative large scale displays.

For more information about CYBERSAR project go to www.cybersar.com.

GRIDA 3

GRIDA 3 (Shared Resources Manager for Environmental Data Analysis and Applications) is an interdisciplinary project designed to provide a holistic description of environmental problems and practical answers to questions of central importance. The project will result in an advanced problem-solving tool for the integration, through a computing portal, of human know-how, simulation software, instrumentation, and resources for data communication, storage, visualization, and computation. The project will supply a Grid infrastructure for collaborative work, built for the sharing of data and applications located at multiple sites across federated domains, public and private.

For more information about GRIDA3 project go to www.grida3.crs4.it.

COMETA

The Cometa Consortium is a non-profit organization whose goals are the realization and management, in Sicily, of an advanced center of research and development, headed for:

Creating activity of basic research and technological applications for the development of HPC systems, of data bank's management, and of systems oriented to the multimedia simulation;
Promoting the development and the dissemination of new computing technologies adopting GRID infrastructures;

For more information about COMETA go to www.consorzio-cometa.it.

LitBio

The LitBio aim is to develop a Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Technologies in Bioinformatics applied to Genomics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics. This project will be capable of providing international research and development programs with the new analysis strategies of biomedical and biotechnological data. It will make possible to establish cooperation between private and public organizations, and to stimulate the growth of new enterprises in the sector of bioinformatics.

For more information about LitBio go to LitBio.

CRESCO

CRESCO (Computational Research Center for Complex Systems) is an ENEA Project, co-funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR).
The CRESCO project will aim to develop a High Performance Computing infrastructure which will be mainly devoted to the study of Complex Systems. These arise in different contexts, from Life Sciences to sociology and embrace most of technological systems which have a relevant impact on society (Critical Infrastructures).
The computing platform, with an estimated 10 Teraflops, will constitute the major node of the ENEA GRID computing facility which links HPC platforms located in the different ENEA Research Centers throughout Italy.

For more information about CRESCO go to www.cresco.enea.it.