DEISA

DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications) is a european supercomputing 's centres consortium, leader at the national level.
This research infrastructure of the European Community' s Sixth Programme Framework has been aimed at creating and managing a distributed terascale supercomputing facility of worldwide importance.
For that purpose a deep integration of the national already operational High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures has been effected, using the current technologies of grid. The integrated computational  power was near 100 Teraflops at the project' s end .

The european researchers were able  to utilize in a simple and coherent manner both the aggregated supercomputing power and the infrastructure of data management .

Particular attention was put to the grand challenge applications in scientific key areas like the materials science, the climatological research, the astrophysics, the energy research oriented to the fusion and the life sciences. In this way the project has been proposing making advance the computational science in Europe.
In order to start a research infrastructure featuring high production quality, DEISA embraced a top-down approach in the operational management, complementary to the most part of the projects R&D of Grid  adopting bottom-up approaches, since  focused  on a specific technology .
Very pragmatically, DEISA stressed the production aspects and didn't  make some "a priori" choices about the hardware and software to be used for making the infrastructure work . The specific technological choices  derived from the capacity of supplying real services to the final users . With such a criterion, it was decided how to integrate the data ,applications and interfaces management layers.