The Grid-Ireland National Grid Infrastructure

Grid-Ireland was established in 1999 to develop a prototype grid service for the academic research community in Ireland that would enable communities of users to construct virtual organisations. As such, it is one of the first examples of a national grid initiative. Today, it is the defacto national grid initiative for Ireland, and is recognised internationally as the co-ordinating body in Ireland for grid activities in major EU projects, such as EGEE[1], it's successor EGI-InSPIRE and related projects. It is also the body that issues grid certificates to the Irish academic community, which are accepted by most major grid infrastructures worldwide. Grid-Ireland sites are interconnected with the Grid using a homogeneous set of hardware and software resources. Minor changes are required to customise each local environment. Machine configurations are securely distributed from a central repository. The core Grid operational issues are co-ordinated by the Grid-Ireland Grid Operations Centre (OpsCentre), based in the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity College Dublin.