Grid technology and environmental applications

Land monitoring, managing and planning are today being configured through networks of interests which, for instance, classify the territory in homogeneous ambits, collect geographic and non-geographic data, distribute certified data and edit predictions and analyses. Autonomous functional centers, nodes of the network, sometimes belonging to different agencies, administrate computing services and large-scale acquisition systems, maintain the knowledge of the territory, archive environmental and anthropic data, run application software, forecast events and operate decision support systems. As a matter of fact, the grand challenges of environmental sciences require computing power, sensing devices and storage capacity that hardly a single organization, public or private, might acquire.

Virtual organization is a term that summarizes a collaborative form of distributed computing across institutional and disciplinary borders whose purpose is to enable the sharing of each institution’s data, information, knowledge and know-how, so that every authorized member may benefit from the aggregated infrastructure, including connecting networks, data and computing servers, software components and applications, configured to form a federated knowledge management system.

The Grid community is bringing to maturity a sophisticated ICT technology to support the staging of virtual organizations. The convergence point are (open source) toolkits such as Globus, gLite, Unicore and iRods (SRB) which provide developers with software (middleware) to set up grid infrastructures and connect distributed applications.