A Bottom-up approach to Grid-Computing at a University: the Black-Forest-Grid Initiative

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the need for highperformance computing. These demands come from disciplines such as particle physics traditionally relying on High Performance Computing (HPC) but lately also from the various branches of life science that have matured into quantitative disciplines. The classical infrastructure of university computer centres results to be unsuited to cope with the new requirements for a multitude of reasons. Here we discuss the causes of this failure and present a solution developed at the University of Freiburg in a collaborative effort of several faculties. We demonstrate that using state of the art grid computing technology the problem can now be addressed in a bottom-up approach. The organizational, technical, and financial components of our framework, the Black Forest Grid Initiative (BFG) are described and results of its implementation are presented. In the process, a number of new questions have emerged which the next phase of our project needs to address.