Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications
The Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications (IASA) was founded in 1994 in order to promote research and postgraduate studies in the Greek University system. It is affiliated with six university departments: Medicine, Physics and Informatics of the University of Athens and Electrical & Computer Engineering, Chemical Engineering and General Science of the National Technical University of Athens. IASA also has a number of support divisions, ranging from computing and electronics to medical physics, which support and enhance the capabilities of the individual research areas. IASA is an autonomous legal entity governed by a Board of Directors elected by the governing bodies of the two Universities and it is managed by a directorate appointed by the Senates of the two Universities. Its developmental program and its operating funds are directly provided by the Ministry of Education which exercises direct financial oversight over the Institute.
IASA is the largest research institute operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Education. The IASA IT/Grid division, through the participation in the HellasGRID cluster computing system, participates in the EGEE Infrastructure. In addition, IASA through its participation in a numerous of EU projects (EGEE-I, EGEE-II, EGEE-III, GRIDCC and EGI-InSPIRE) has built up significant expertise in the coordination & operation of a production-grade Grid infrastructure and in the porting and support of users and applications. The Grid Operations Center in IASA is one of the major stakeholders of the Greek National Grid Initiative (HellasGrid) and it maintains one of the official HellasGrid clusters (HG-02-IASA). At the international level, the IASA held (on behalf of GRNET) the position of deputy Regional Operations Coordinator for the EGEE ' South Eastern Europe region and it was also the South Eastern Europe's Regional Coordinator for the application porting/support activity. Nowadays, in the EGI era, the IASA is acting as the task leader for the User Community Technical Services offered by the EGI-InSPIRE project.
