DEISA

DEISA, in full Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, former European consortium (2002–11) of national supercomputer centres—partially funded by the European Union (EU)—that were networked for high-performance computing, especially to facilitate distributed computing for scientific research. DEISA also maintained a network link with TeraGrid, a supercomputing network in the United States.

In 2002 a pan-European supercomputing network was proposed to the EU. In 2004 the EU began cofunding the development of the network with eight national centres that agreed to set aside a portion of their supercomputer resources for scientific projects at the European level. The network was operational by 2006, by which time three more national centres had joined the network. In 2008 the EU awarded a three-year contract for continued development and improvement of the network. The first phase of the project then became known as DEISA1 and the subsequent phase as DEISA2. The ultimate goal of DEISA was the establishment of a persistent supercomputing platform for European scientific research.

There were 11 principal partners in DEISA: one in Finland, Finnish Information Technology Centre for Science; one in France, National Centre for Scientific Research; four in Germany, High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Leibniz Computing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Rechenzentrum Garching of the Max Planck Society; one in Italy, CINECA; one in the Netherlands, SARA Computing and Networking Services; one in Spain, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre; and two in the United Kingdom, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. In addition, DEISA had four associate members, or candidates for full integration: in France, CEA Computing Centre; in Russia, Joint Supercomputing Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences; in Switzerland, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre; and in Sweden, Royal Institute of Technologies–Centre for Parallel Computers.

In 2011 DEISA ended as the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe took over its services.