The Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems is part of the Autonomous Research Division (AKE), one of the three main divisions of the Computer and Automation Research Institute (SZTAKI) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The LPDS focuses its research on cluster and grid technologies, applying its research results in products such as the P-GRADE Grid Portal, gUSE and the SZTAKI Desktop Grid. The Laboratory is an active participant in European Grid projects including Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) and Enabling Desktop Grids for e-Science (EDGeS)[1].
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The main research areas of the LPDS are parallel distributed and concurrent programming, graphical programming environments, supercomputing, cluster computing and Grid computing.
Major projects
The Laboratory participated in the CoreGRID Network of Excellence and has been working as a project member in all phases of the grid infrastructure project Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE), serving as a regional training centre from 2004, as the assistant leader in training from 2007 and as the coordinator of application porting centers from 2008. The LPDS is the coordinator of the EU FP7 EDGeS (Enabling Desktop Grids for e-Science) project with the aim of bridging service grid and desktop grid infrastructures and supporting their user communities from both academic and industry environments. The Laboratory also participates in other large international projects such as SEE-GRID-SCI, S-Cube, ETICS-2 and CancerGRID.
WEB2GRID
The WEB2GRID project aims to facilitate the commercial and non-profit exploitation of the EDGeS EU FP7 Desktop Grid project and the HAGRID project focusing on the Desktop Grid and WEB2 technologies. While WEB2 technologies assist to assure the resources in the desktop grid community on voluntary or settlement bases, the developed platform extended with desktop grid systems offers back-end infrastructure for the operational requirements of WEB2 portals and systems. By combining WEB2 with Desktop Grid technologies, WEB2 can extend its capabilities from the community contents towards to shared services with the help of grid technologies. The project aims to develop the tools, interfaces and methodologies through which the above mentioned targeted services can be established both in closed (local desktop grid), and in open (global desktop grid) environments.[5]
A comprehensive list of other projects can be found on the LPDS homepage.
GASuC
The Grid Application Support Centre is an EGEE-supported project established in 2008. In close collaboration with application owners, GASuC provides assistance in gridification (i.e. porting legacy applications onto Grid infrastructures). The GASuC team identifies the suitable approaches and tools for the porting process, sets up realistic porting scenarios and organizes workshops and personalized training events for application owners[6].
Portals for Grids/VOs
The LPDS sets up Grid portal installations serving user communities of international multi-institutional grids and grid based virtual organizations. The list of actual P-GRADE Portal installations can be found on the P-Grade Portal homepage. The list of gUSE Portal installations can be found on the gUSE homepage.
OMNeT++
The LPDS carried out the gridification of OMNeT++, a public-source, component-based, modular, discrete event simulation environment. OMNeT++ is frequently used in a wide area of simulation applications due to its strong GUI support and embeddable simulation kernel. The P-GRADE Portal environment was successfully integrated with the OMNeT++ simulation framework to enable large-scale grid resources to the simulation user community, providing significant performance increase for OMNeT++-based simulations[7].
GSSVA (Security Assessment Tool)
Grid Site Software Vulnerability Analyzer is a monitoring tool which collects important information about the status of the grid machines, analyzes the information gathered and compares the results using an external information repository to find the security problems of machines. The tool can be set up and maintained easily, as administrators do not need to install the client side or configure the firewalls, and the information is visualized through a graphical user interface[8].
Since 2004 the LPDS has been operating the Central-European Regional Training Centre of EGEE and plays active role in providing grid trainings in Europe and worldwide. With the national and international trainings the Laboratory provides knowledge transfer and targets new users from industry as well as from science. The LPDS has organized and hosted grid summer schools in 2005, 2006, and 2007. In year 2008 the LPDS organized the world's largest grid training event, the ISSGC08 Grid Summer School, and also hosted several grid related training events.
The Head of the LPDS is Prof. Dr. Péter Kacsuk. The Deputy Head of the LPDS is Dr. Robert Lovas. 1 DSc, 5 PhDs, and over 20 full or part-time members work in the laboratory.