Overview of Japanese National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) Project

The Japanese National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) is a 5-year project covering the period 2003 to 2007. The goals of the project are to 1) conduct R&D on high-performance and scalable Grid middleware to provide a future computational infrastructure for scientific and engineering research in Japan, 2) Grid-enable a specific target application, in this case nanoscience, to prove the usefulness of Grids in future scientific and industrial applications, and 3) perform experimental deployment of 100 TFLOPS-scale Grids based on the middleware and Grid-enabled applications that have been constructed. The National Institute of Informatics (in charge of Grid middleware R&D), the Institute for Molecular Science (in charge of Grid-enabling nanoscience applications), major universities, and industries will participate in this project. The Super SINET, an all-optical 10 Gbps and beyond backbone network for academic research, will be used as the network infrastructure for this project. This paper outlines the NAREGI project.