The INRIA Sophia Antipolis research unit has been selected by the French Ministry of Research, in the framework of the ACI GRID programme, to be one of the main nodes of the GRID'5000 computing infrastructure. The GRID'5000 project aims at building an experimental Grid platform gathering less than a dozen of geographically distributed sites in France combining up to 5000 processors with a certain level of heterogeneity both in terms of processor and network types. The current plans are to assemble a physical platform featuring 8 clusters, each with between 100 to 1000 PCs connected by the Renater education and research national network. All clusters will be connected to Renater at 1 Gb/s (10 Gb/s is expected in a near future). This highly collaborative effort is funded by the French Ministry of Research, INRIA, CNRS and several regional councils. This initiative is governed by a steering committee, headed by Dr. Franck Capello, and a technical committee gathering several system engineers working in all of the GRID'5000 sites.

The main objective of the GRID'5000 project is to provide the community of Grid researchers in France with an experimental platform fully, easily and remotely configurable for each experiment. The scope of the experiments that will be conducted on the GRID'5000 platform covers all the software layers between the user and the Grid hardware (clusters and networks). Typically, a Grid researcher will be able to configure part or all the platform with its favorite network protocols, OS kernel and distribution, middleware, runtime environments and applications, and run experiments with these settings. The partners of the GRID'5000 project will also provide a set a software tools to facilitate experiments configuration, planning, execution and control. The experiments currently envisioned by the project participants are concerned with high speed network protocol design and evaluation, operating system adaptation and improvement in the perspective of a single system image for the Grid, adding sandboxing and virtualisation in OS for the Grid, testing the benefits of object oriented middleware for distributed applications design, evaluating a large variety of fault tolerance techniques at the runtime level, gridification and performance evaluation of large-scale scientific applications, design of novel algorithms for high performance computing on the Grid.

INRIA Sophia Antipolis has been awarded twice (1st GRID'5000 call in 2003 and 2nd GRID'5000 call in 2004) by the ACI GRID. In parallel, additional financial support has been obtained from the Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur regional council and the Alpes Maritimes general council. Finally, Grid5000@Sophia is also benefiting from financial support and human ressources from INRIA. The main objective of the Grid5000@Sophia project is to setup a 512 processors heterogeneous cluster by the end of 2006. In December 2004, the configuration of this cluster consists of 140 IBM e325 servers (dual AMD Opteron/2 GHz node, Gigabit interconnection).