International and EU projects

LPDS participated in the CoreGRID Network of Excellence, and has been working as a project member in all the phases of the largest European grid infrastructure project (EGEE, EGI-Inspire) serving as a regional training centre (from 2004), as the assistant leader in training (2007-2010), and the coordinator of appli-cation porting centers (2008-2010). The laboratory was the coordinator of the EU FP7 EDGeS infrastructure project with the aim of bridging service grid and desktop grid infrastructures and supporting their user communities from both academy and industry. From 2010 the laboratory is the leader of two follow-up projects of EDGeS; the EDGI project with the main aim to extend the technology towards cloud computing and other middleware solutions, and the DEGISCO project targeting new partners and application areas from non-EU countries. LPDS is the coordinator of the SHIWA project that integrates some of the major workflow systems developed in Europe and in the US. LPDS also participated in other international Grid projects such as ETICS-2, CancerGRID, and each phase of SEE-GRID.

National projects

LPDS has substantial experience in establishing grid infrastructures. Together with KFKI-RMKI the laboratory has established the HUNGRID infrastructure. HUNGRID is the Hungarian Virtual Organisation of the European Grid Infrastructure and it is extended with P-GRADE Grid Portal. In the framework of different projects LPDS provided cluster technologies for meteorologists, contributed to a grid infrastructure for chemists and participated in the integration of supercomputers into grids. The laboratory co-operated with Hungarian partners as well in various application areas such as weather forecast, environmental modelling, and drug discovery. LPDS established and operates as a 24/7 service the SZTAKI Desktop Grid infrastructure, which serves as a base technology for NKTH funded grid projects, HAGRID and WEB2GRID, with the scientific coordination of LPDS and involvement of small and medium size enterprises.

Cloud research

Our cloud computing group is focusing on research related to the field of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based cloud systems. We have investigated various applications of virtualization techniques (including several virtual machine monitors - e.g. Xen, Qemu, Kvm). We have provided techniques to extend the currenlty available desktop grid systems with behavior similar to IaaS systems in order to enable the creation of virtual machines on the computing resource donor machines (see details here). We have faced the problem of distributing virtual machine images (or virtual appliances) between the different components of the resulting system. This problem has also arisen while we were focusing on virtualization based service deployment solutions. Our research revealed that specially crafted and stored virtual appliances could improve their delivery significantly (see details here). Efficient and automated virtual appliance deployment provides the foundation to federated cloud infrastructures and auto-scaling clusters. Therefore, we have analyzed techniques to enable interoperation between the currently available IaaS systems through multi level brokering solutions (see details here). We have also studied approaches that allow localized computing cluster infrastructures (accessible through batch systems) to be scaled by creating special virtual appliances supporting the extension towards multiple IaaS systems (see details here). Our research results identified serveral autonomous, heuristic and optimization problems that we plan to investigat with with nature-inspired models and algorithms (see details here).