GRIDSEED: A Virtual Training Grid Infrastructure

GRIDSEED provides a simple tool to setup a portable and interoperable Grid infrastructure based on virtual machines. The GRIDSEED tool was originally developed to easily deploy a training gLite Grid infrastructure almost ev- erywhere in the world with a set of machines (simple PC's) locally connected among them as the only requirement. It uses standard virtualization tools (VirtualBox and/or VMmare) easily and widely available. Recently the virtual en- vironment is enriched with other different middleware (Arc and Globus Toolkit ) to make it the first virtual training laboratory for interoperability and interoperation among different middleware. GRIDSEED is therefore a complete training environment formed by a virtual infrastructure complemented by some demo applications and training ma- terials ready to be used both in standard training events and advanced interoperation demo/events session. In this paper we present the motivations behind this tool, the way it could be installed and used for training events and some technical details.