The international consortium, set up by ESA for the SpaceGRID study, is ready to start work in mid September. The aim is to study how GRID applications can benefit space science, Earth observation, space weather and spacecraft engineering. Shortly after in October, two international meetings on the GRID have been scheduled at different venues in Frascati, just outside Rome in Italy.

What is the GRID?

The idea behind it is simple. As very few people or organisations use the full capacity of their computers’ processing power, the idea is to harness this unused resource through the internet to solve major computational problems that require far more ‘memory’ and computing power than that available at any one site; rather in the same way that we plug into the electricity grid to run an electrical appliance whenever needed.

A scaled-down version of this idea was first put into practice a year ago by the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. By enlisting the help of volunteers, they are able to ‘plug into’ the processing power of millions of home computers to sift through radio signals to search for messages from space.

Others have been quick to realise the enormous potential of this idea and GRID projects have now been set up in many areas of the world. ESA has started an internal GRID initiative to look into the possibilities of using the GRID for a wide range of space applications and is also involved in international GRID projects such as DataGRID, which is funded by the European Union.

ESA’s SpaceGRID

ESA's new SpaceGRID project starts in September 2001 and is scheduled for completion in 18 months

Dozens of satellites are constantly collecting data about our planetary system - the Earth in particular - 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Satellite data is used for many purposes, for example for telecommunications, navigation systems and environmental monitoring. However, even with the most powerful computers processing all this data is time-consuming and expensive. Distributing these tasks over a number of low-cost internet-connected platforms would provide enormous potential, at a relatively low cost, for many space applications.

To look into this exciting possibility ESA is about to begin work on its SpaceGRID project. This will be run by an international consortium of industry and research centres led by Datamat (Italy). Other members include Alcatel Space (France), CS Systemes d’Information (France), Science Systems Plc (UK), QinetiQ (UK) and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory of the UK Council for the Central Laboatory of the Research Councils.

The project aims to assess how GRID technology can serve requirements across a large variety of space disciplines, sketch the design of an ESA-wide GRID infrastructure, foster collaboration and enable shared efforts across space applications. It will analyse the highly complicated technical aspects of managing, accessing, exploiting and distributing large amounts of data, and set up test projects to see how well the GRID performs at carrying out specific tasks in Earth observation, space weather, space science and spacecraft engineering.

The results of the study should be available within 18 months, but meanwhile ESA will be kept informed of the progress being made and project activities will be synchronised with the ESA internal GRID initiative.

Two other aspects of this project are of particular importance for ESA: finding a way to ensure that the data processed by the SpaceGRID can be made available to public and educational establishments, and ensuring that SpaceGRID activities are coordinated with other major international initiatives. This is one reason why the October meetings of the DataGRID and the Global Grid Forum are of particular interest to ESA.