**2.3.2 GARUDA: The national grid initiative of India**

GARUDA is India's first national grid initiative bringing together academic, scientific and research communities for developing their data and compute intensive applications with guaranteed Quality of Service. The project is coordinated by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) under the funding of Department of Information Technology (DIT) of Government of India. GARUDA involves 36 Partner institutions with 45 research and academic centres. GARUDA ended its Proof of Concept phase in 2008 and concluded the Foundation Phase in August 2009.

Afterwards GARUDA has moved successfully to the Operational phase, thereby providing sustainable production grade computing infrastructure as a service to its partners. With this endeavour, the GARUDA grid is playing a key role in accelerating the research work by inter-connecting academicians, researchers, policy makers and the masses at large. Applications of national importance are being hosted on the vast infrastructure offered by the GARUDA grid, to solve grand challenge problems of national priority as Disaster Management (DMSAR) and Bio informatics. At present GARUDA network infrastructure is provided by NKN (see section 2.1), consolidating this way the integration between NKN and Indian grid infrastructures and related applications.

Within the grid infrastructure various resources such as High Performance Computing systems (HPC) and satellite based communication systems have been committed by different centres of C-DAC and GARUDA partners. GARUDA Grid is composed of various heterogeneous computing resources such as HPC clusters and SMP systems running on AIX, Linux and Solaris. At the moment GARUDA is offering several thousand of cores. The total computational power available today on Garuda is approximately 65 Teraflops.

GARUDA is well equipped with the provisioning of a customized middleware stack that can effectively harness this diverse range of resources being available on the grid. The middleware stack is enabled with CDAC's in-house developed, efficient reservation managers that ensure high availability & reliability of the resources to the applications running on the production grid infrastructure. Basic grid middleware services are provided by GlobusToolkit –4.0.8 on the top of which Gridway metascheduler has been enabled.
