OPENING

The last day of the recent PIONIER 2003 conference was devoted to "Cooperation of Sun Microsystems with scientific community on development of grid-portal technologies". The session held on Friday, 11th of April, introduced the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center as Sun's Center of Excellence in New Generation Networks, Grids and Portals. Mr. Todd Korth presented Prof. Jan Węglarz with a board memorizing the fact. Later, PSNC presented its grid-portal research results, which could be achieved in cooperation with Sun.

PSNC achieved its excellence in new generation networks (NGN), grids and portals while realizing numerous European Commission (EC) and State Committee for Scientific Research (KBN) founded project. Within the scope of NGNs, the latest achievements include establishing the 2.5 Gbit/s connection to the European GEANT network. As for the development of the information infrastructure for science in Poland for 2001-2005, PSNC has participated in the development of the "PIONIER: Polish Optical Internet -Advanced Applications, Services and Technologies for the Information Society" program. PSNC is also actively participating in several projects funded within the 5th Framework Program and concerning NGNs (ATRIUM, SEQUIN, 6-NET).

As far as middleware and grids are considered works which have recently been realized in this scope concerned the problem of a national computing cluster and the virtual users system to manage and administer the cluster. Additionally, the skills in the field of metaprocessing and resource management gave the grounds for working out and developing grid projects in PSNC.

In relation to development of portals reusable components were needed to build portals for different grid-enabled applications, allowing uniform desktop access to remote resources. Such components must have included tools and services enabling easy collaboration, job submission, job monitoring, component discovery, and persistent object storage. Currently, PSNC is providing several portal frameworks developed in different technologies and deployed for information services, multimedia content management as well as for advanced grid environments.

On the basis of its excellence in grids and portals technologies PSNC booked its place in several projects concerning grid computing. These are:

As a Sun's COE PSNC is able to cooperate with other centers around the world, thus foster new ideas in the research areas of interest.