Terradue’s gridify is a service application environment solution that presents a new vision to the production, management and distribution of spatial data where Grid technology joins geographical data inventory and query systems. It enables the implementation and configuration of composite services requiring the use of substantial computer and data resources. The Grid model developed by Terradue has proven to overcome known problems that haunt GeoSpatial services with the paradigm change in the data and application flows. This paradigm change reduces the strain on the network, optimizes the use processing resources, reduces substantially or eliminates completely data access time delays and shipping issues and provides a framework for IPR enforcement and management.

Environmental and Earth Science services and applications are increasingly collaborative and multi-disciplinary, and it is not unusual for teams to span institutions, states, countries and continents. The validation of GeoSpatial services and climate change models often requires a large amount of processing resources and highly interactive access to large amounts of environmental information. On the other-hand, the cost of the necessary computing infrastructure coupled with the access to large volumes of data is often too high to motivate local investments. As such, providing a common shared infrastructure accessible to users is a very valuable and cost effective approach to support application and service development. Grid technologies seek in a flexible and controlled way to link data, computers and resources into single virtual organizations by providing the necessary protocols and services.

Grid systems have the purpose of resource sharing among different actors in a flexible, secure and coordinated fashion. These actors might be individuals, institutions or resources with different conceptual data models and their inherent processing. Grid computing seeks to bind machines together, whether they are within a single facility or scattered around the world, in such a way that massive sharing of data and processing capacity should be possible to a range of applications. With the gridify development, Terradue works to exploit and strengthen best practices in distributed data processing, archiving and discovery for Earth sciences, finance and medicine. The emphasis is on the immediate delivery of robust operational systems while keeping a concrete roadmap to build the next generation data processing and storage systems. Collaboratively with best-known open source projects Terradue works to optimize data discovery, processing, archiving and distribution with peer-to-peer technology.

Coupled with a networks of computers, gridify provides the flexibility for the integration of applications with data workflows, distributed data access, grid computing and storage capability. With a common subset of well-known standards for geographic metadata, gridify delivers a set of services for indexing, searching, sharing and storing very large spatial data sets. It provides the necessary flexibility for the integration of applications (without any re-engineering or source code access) with work-flows, data access and computer or storage resources. Its modular nature provide the tools and methods for capture, manage, process, store, preserve and deliver content across a community of users. On the other hand, gridify enables the large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources intra or across institutional boundaries providing an off-the-shelf solution for the installation of a private local computing GRID and execution of services and applications. These features taken together make gridify the core of what is needed to build a spatial data infrastructure.

The gridify product is built on the heritage of the European Space Agency (ESA) Grid Processing on-Demand infrastructure (G-POD) initiated in 2003, developed and maintained by Terradue as an European Space Agency's incubated spin-off. Through the incubation process started in 2006 Terradue pushed the development of gridify into a generic product enlarging its use beyond the Earth observation applications and services. The product is focused for two main usages:

• An off-the-shelf solution for a seamless implementation and support of high performance computing architectures for industries or research facilities with intensive services and applications
  
• An interoperable connectivity with external shared resources promoting collaboration and developing bridges between the Industry/Research institutions to share mutual and dynamically available resources for institutions with low computational and storage resources with a sporadic need to run demanding services and applications.

The gridify web portal is capable of managing users account and files, applications and services, instantiating and scheduling tasks, submitting and retrieving status query of tasks on different grid infrastructures and middlewares. Working together with an abstraction layer, it builds a reusable framework taking seamless care of the data housekeeping and basic workflow processing tasks recurrent to most data processing applications. The creation and connection to secure grid sessions, file registry and retrieval, job submission together with session and job status are included among these capabilities. All the necessary grid operations performed in all phases, such as applications and data files transfer, grid job status, exception and error management were virtualized to different grid middlewares.

The gridify is currently the software that powers the ESA Earth Observation Grid Processing on-Demand, the Earth observation business experiment in the BEinGrid European Commission (EC) project, the ESA Ionia GlobCover Data Distribution Center and it will also power the EC’s 7th framework programme project GENESI-DR (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Repositories) application web portal.

For some examples of portals built using gridify check this entry.