ShareGrid was born in 2007 from an idea of Cosimo Anglano (associate professor of the Computer Science Department of the Universita’ del Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro”) shared by Guglielmo Girardi (at the time Product Manager in TOP-IX) after one year of idle discussions in “Piemonte Grid” initiative. The turning point was the decision of realizing a real grid-computing project involving the participants of “Piemonte Grid”.
The name “ShareGrid” was proposed by Simone Arena (at that time in TOP-IX team) instead of a more usual “GridLab”.
The logo, a silhouette of Regione Piemonte marked with ShareGrid, was introduced by Massimo Canonico (Department of Computer Science of the Universita’ del Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro”), when we had to present the first results of ShareGrid activities during the December 7th 2007 meeting.
The role of TOP-IX and the fundings from Regione Piemonte in support of the necessary man efforts were crucial for the development of the Project.
The project really took off at the end of the first year of activity, thanks to the joint efforts of Massimo Canonico and Marco Guazzone (Department of Computer Science of the Universita’ del Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro”), Sergio Rabellino (Department of Computer Science of the Universita’ di Torino) and the pilot users Paolo Tosco (Department of Drug Science, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Torino, Italy) and Riccardo Boero (Department of Economic and Financial Sciences “G. Prato”, Faculty of Economics, University of Torino, Italy).
The experience is recorded in the paper: Cosimo Anglano, Massimo Canonico, Marco Guazzone, Marco Botta, Sergio Rabellino, Simone Arena, Guglielmo Girardi, “Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grids in the Real World: The ShareGrid Project,” ccgrid, pp.609-614, 2008 Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID), 2008.
Thereafter most of the effort was devoted to consolidating the ShareGrid platform, recruiting new users and laboratories with a strong support on how to join the community and how to run the new applications and finally to the development, debugging and test of the new ShareGrid Web Portal
The grid was intensively used in 2008 and 2009 as showed in the graphs of the Grid Status variables collected every hour since 2008/09/26 and until 2010/11/02. An analysis of real usage data is reported in: Cosimo Anglano, Massimo Canonico and Marco Guazzone, “The ShareGrid Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grid: Infrastructure, Applications, and Performance Evaluation”, Journal of Grid Computing Volume 8, Number 4, 543-570, DOI: 10.1007/s10723-010-9162-z.
The 2010 is the last year of the ShareGrid project as initially conceived by ToP-IX. The results so far reached demonstrated the feasibility of the whole project: the grid platform to use, the relationships with the research laboratories and users, the roles of the leading groups, the organizations of the various activities, the importance and value of a computing community, the assessment of the relative costs, etc.
In the next future a greater involvement of the Universities in the coordination activity is ready to start a new generation of ShareGrid.
December 2010
This site has been set-up by Guglielmo Girardi with the precious suggestions of Gianluca Faletti (ToP-IX) on how to use WordPress. Guglielmo merged the original pages (hosted by DCS Group of Department of Computer Science of the Universita’ del Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro” here) with an approach to the presentation of the web content centered on the ShareGrid Community idea. Unfortunately some technical pages still refer to the old core-peer ramses.di.unipmn.it that is no longer active and therefore some services are not currently available.
