The grid is powered by applications

The grid infrastructure has been designed to support many different types of research applications, used by many different users and user communities. These applications form a complex ecosystem of usage models and associated tools. The grid provides the basic infrastructure necessary to deploy them and satisfy their computational and data management needs.

Several scientific applications have already supported on the grid. These are maintained by the SAGrid operations team, and are deployed to all sites, using the SAGrid software repository.

Applications, Virtual Organisations, Portability

Usually applications are used by groups of people, with various roles in their scientific collaboration. These identities, roles and authorisations are encapsulated in the concepts of Virtual Organisations. Virtual Organisations are dynamic and self-organising, independently of the underlying infrastructure, so users are able to operate and organise themselves to a large extent not having to know the actual distribution or management model of the grid. Of course, the team of experts at each site is responsible for the proper functioning of the middleware, so as to allow this transparency.

Application Porting

To run efficiently in a distributed environment, some modifications and improvements sometimes need to be made to existing applications. This can take many forms, and in some cases improves greatly the functionality of the application, which can now use several API's to access services based on the grid - metadata, identity, authorisation and authentication, computing, storage, data movement and replication, etc.

In order to encourage new applications and help new users, a status classification and porting scheme has been adopted, in collaboration with the EPIKH project.

New Applications

Do you have an application which you or your group are working on, and want to work on porting it to the national grid ? The EPIKH project and GILDA together with SAGrid are always looking for new applications and users can send their requirements to the porting team by filling out the application questionnaire