GARUDA¹ is a collaboration of science researchers and experimenters on a nationwide grid of computational nodes, mass storage and scientific instruments that aims to provide the technological advances required to enable data and compute intensive science for the 21st century. One of GARUDA's most important challenges is to strike the right balance between research and the daunting task of deploying innovation into some of the most complex scientific and engineering endeavors being undertaken today.

Building a commanding position in Grid computing is crucial for India. By allowing researchers to easily access supercomputer-level processing power and knowledge resources, grids will underpin progress in Indian science, engineering and business. The challenge facing India today is to turn technologies developed for researchers into industrial strength business tools.

The Department of Information Technology² (DIT), Government of India has funded the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing³ (C-DAC) to deploy the nationwide computational grid ‘GARUDA' which will connect 17 cities across the country in its Proof of Concept (PoC) phase with an aim to bring "Grid" networked computing to research labs and industry. GARUDA will accelerate India's drive to turn its substantial research investment into tangible economic benefits.

GARUDA aims at strengthening and advancing scientific and technological excellence in the area of Grid and Peer-to-Peer technologies. The strategic objectives of GARUDA are to:

• Create a test bed for the research and engineering of technologies, architectures, standards and applications in Grid Computing
• Bring together all potential research, development and user groups who can help develop a national initiative on Grid computing
• Create the foundation for the next generation grids by addressing long term research issues in the strategic areas of knowledge and data management, programming models, architectures, grid management and monitoring, problem solving environments, grid tools and services

The following key deliverables have been identified as important to achieving the GARUDA objectives:

• Grid tools and services to provide an integrated infrastructure to applications and higher-level layers
• A Pan-Indian communication fabric to provide seamless and high-speed access to resources
• Aggregation of resources including compute clusters, storage and scientific instruments
• Creation of a consortium to collaborate on grid computing and contribute towards the aggregation of resources
• Grid enablement and deployment of select applications of national importance requiring aggregation of distributed resources

To achieve the above objectives, GARUDA brings together a critical mass of well-established researchers from 45 research laboratories and academic institutions that have formulated an ambitious program of activities.