Collaboration type: Collaboration Agreement

About GARR: GARR is the ultra-broadband network dedicated to the Italian research and education community. Its main objective is to provide high-performance connectivity and to develop innovative services for the daily activities of researchers, professors and students as well as for international collaboration. GARR network is designed and managed by Consortium GARR, a non-profit association founded under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, University and Research. The founding members are CNR, ENEA, INFN e CRUI Foundation, representing all Italian universities.

Short description of the collaboration & main achievements in the period: The collaboration, formalised through an official agreement signed between GARR and CNR late in 2016 and updated in March 2018, foresees the enhancement of the D4Science infrastructure with the provision of computational and storage resources. GARR provides D4Science with 650 Virtual CPU cores, 1300 GB of memory and 50 TB of storage.  These resources have been made available by GARR federated data centers in Italy.

As in the EGI case, These resources provide the community managers operating a BlueBRIDGE Virtual Research Environment with additional computing and storage power. This agreement is very important for BlueBRIDGE as the resources provided by GARR represent close to 45% of the BlueBRIDGE demand for computational resources.

Plans for the future: The collaboration had an initial duration of 15 months, from January 1st 2017 to March 31st 2017. After this first period, the GARR-D4Science agreement has been renewed. The new agreement fosters the provision of additional 650 Virtual CPU cores, 1300 GB of memory and 50 TB of storage that will be added to the already provided resources. Overall GARR will cover 65% of the BlueBRIDGE demand for computational resources.