España Virtual (Virtual Spain) is a research project, funded in part by the CDTI under the framework of the INGENIO 2010 Spanish government initiative, in which eight Spanish companies and institutions seek to significantly contribute to the definition and standardization of the new Web 3.0 and its underlying technologies. Based on the multimedia and interactive contents of the Web 2.0, España Virtual aims to add to the new Web social, semantic, and geographic layers of knowledge, allowing the development of 3D tools that will integrate all this knowledge into the virtual world.
This project is highly innovative in the treatment of geographic and other geo-referenced data and information such as management methods, visualization and simulation techniques, integration and processing of ontology data, grid computing applied to spatial data flows, etc.

Partners:

• Deimos Space S.L.
• Androme Iberica, S.L.
• Centro Nacional de Información Geográfica
• Dnextep Consulting, S.L.
• Grid Systems, S.A.
• GeoSpatiumLab, S.L.
• GeoVirtual, S.L.
• Indra Espacio, S.A.

Total Budget: 37 Million Euros
This Spanish National CENIT project aims to develop an optimized, technologically and methodologically advanced infrastructure for the Finance industry that will mean a radical break and advance from the exiting banking architectures. The development of this new infrastructure will be based on open standard paradigms and Grid computing technology with the help of artificial intelligence techniques. The result will be the definition and creation of an environment that will support collaboration and will be flexible enough to adopt new regulations dynamically. The final impact of this project is foreseen to be an integral management banking system will be introduced in national and international markets.

Partners:

• INDRA
• Caja Madrid
• Sun Microsystems Ibérica
• GridSystems
• Daedalus
• Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid: Grupo Internet de Nueva Generación
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid: Grupo de Sistemas Inteligentes
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid: Sistemas de Tiempo real y Arquitecturas de Servicios Telemáticos
• Universidad Politécnica de Valencia: Grupo de Redes y Computación de Altas Prestaciones (GRyCAP)
• Universidad Carlos III de Madrid: Departamento de Teoría de la Señal y de las Comunicaciones

Total Budget: 34 Million Euros

The main objective of this CENIT project is the creation of a multidisciplinary platform formed by industrial partners and research centers, both clinic and technology-oriented, in order to create a system that will optimize the methods used in the transfer of research results, but focusing mainly on e-Health-related projects. The consortium will first and foremost center in the technologies used in molecular medicine, more specifically in molecular imaging and the biotechnology processes involved in the development of molecules. As a secondary strategic purpose, the consortium will also study those technologies that use multimodal image analysis and treatment in the diagnosis and healing processes.

Partners:

• SUINSA
• Real Academia de Ciencias
• BioTools
• CIBASA
• BARNATRON
• CETIR
• RGB-Medical
• General Electric
• Hospital Gregorio Marañón
• Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas
• Centro de Investigación del Cáncer (Salamanca)
• Universidad Politécnica Madrid
• Universidad Complutense
• Universidad Politécnica Valencia
• Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
• Instituto de Óptica, CSIC
• Universidad Carlos III
• IDIBAPS (Hospital Cliníc)
• Philips Sistemas Médicos
• Silicon Graphics
• Guidant
• GridSystems
• UDIAT
• Alma IT Systems
• CETIR Group Mèdic
• Centro Cardiovascular Sant Jordi
• Universitat Pompeu Fabra
• Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, Centro de Diagnóstico por Imágen
• Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, Instituto del Torax
• Universitat de Girona
• Barcelona Supercomputing Centre Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
• Instituto de Óptica, CSIC
• Universidad Carlos III
• IDIBAPS (Hospital Cliníc)

CardioSync focused on the development of a system that took advantage of the synergies between different imaging techniques and advanced computer-based processing. It tested these concepts in the framework of planning, evaluation and selection of candidates in a therapeutic process known as cardiac resynchronization. The electric and dynamical aspects of heart diseases were studied, as well as its inter-dependencies by using PDE-based computer simulations of the mechanical and electrical heart dynamics.

GridEDP

This project was a study to integrate the calculations of partially derived equations from a supercomputing model to an internet-oriented-components platform, as well as to evaluate the commercial applications of such development. This type of calculations is commonly used in the manufacturing sector. Industries such as Aeronautics and Automobile use numeric simulation in their design and production processes. The goal of this study was the possibilities and the benefits the emerging Grid computation could bring to this scenario. This project showed that Grid technology could be successfully pushed into these industrial sectors. As a follow-up of this project, we are currently participating in the 6th Framework Programme projects IPAS and CODES.

GridHPCsf

This industrial project focused on studying computational methods to integrate finance instruments, distributed computing and grid technology, based on a flexible and scalable platform solution. Currently GridSystems is able to integrate several financial applications into InnerGrid (like an Excel Connector and a VaR application). The commercial follow-up of this project has already produced sales in the financial sector in Spain and the UK.

GridDFT

This viability study found ways to introduce supercomputing in the atomistic simulation of materials. DFT (Density Functional Theory) is one of the most popular approaches to quantum mechanical many-body electronic structure calculations of molecular and condensed matter systems. The grid-enabling of several products that run atomistic simulation, such as SIESTA, WIEN, Gaussian, etc., were analyzed and the results were promising. As a commercial follow up, a customer was established in the pharmaceutical sector in Japan who makes use of the Grid-enabling of Gaussian.

GridGAs

Genetic Algorithms (GAs) include a family of heuristic search methods and computational models designed after Darwin’s principle on natural selection. GAs are applied to processes that involve job/task scheduling or resource planning. The genetic algorithms that were best parallelized were those based on the calculation involving multiple populations. Currently, commercial follow-ups of the projects are under study, although we need to find specialized partners.

RiskMining

This project was an investigation of data mining techniques and genetic algorithms used for credit risk management in credit and investment firms and how these processes could be optimized through grid computing. Of all the techniques analyzed, the best results were obtained with tree models. This project, as a complement of GridHPCsf project, has contributed to the establishment of InnerGrid as a Grid middleware for the financial sector.

GridTelecom

This study introduced grid computing in the Telecommunications sector. Parallel and distributed computation was proven to be suitable to optimize network planning and management, and data-mining and data-warehousing processes. The new platform could expedite billing, or work against fraud, for instance, in a scalable way, and thus absorb peaks and guarantee the completion of critical processes. A major outcome of this study for GridSystems was the liaison developed between Telefónica and GridSystems. Additionally, GridSystems has established a strong partnership with the CM Group in Italy; and through CM, GridSystems has reach the Italian telecom sector for whom it has adapted the Grid middleware. This partnership has already produced sales in the Italian telecom sector.

CardiUS3D

The main goal of CardiUS3D was the development of novel tools for real-time quantitative assessment of the cardiac function from 3D ultrasound (3DUS) image sequences. The result robustly obtained in real-time a geometric model of the heart from 3DUS sequences that allowed the computation of clinical indexes related to the anatomy and function of the heart. As a follow-up of this project, we have established a solid partnership with the Computational Imaging Lab of the UPF, and we are currently members of the @neurIST consortium.