Astrocomp: a web portal for high performance computing on a grid of supercomputers

Astrocomp is a project based on a collaboration among the University of Roma La Sapienza, the Astrophysical Observatory of Catania and ENEA. The main motivation of the AstroComp project is to construct a portal, which allows to set up a repository of computational codes and common databases, making them available and enjoyable, with a user-friendly graphical web interface, to the international community. AstroComp will allow the scientific community to benefit by the use of many different numerical tools implemented on high performance computing (HPC) resources, both for theoretical astrophysics and cosmology and for the storage and analysis of astronomical data, without the need of specific training, know-how and experience either in computational techniques or in database construction and management methods. An essential feature of Astrocomp is that it makes available to subscribers some CPU time on large parallel platforms, via specific grants. Astrocomp is partly financed by a grant of the Italian national research Council (CNR).