EGEE

EGEE-III project (http://www.eu-egee.org/), the largest and most important EU funded Grid infrastructure project, now has entered to its third phase. EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-SciencE) is a collaborative effort among 139 institutions in 32 countries, organised in 13 ‘Federations’. The associated Grid production infrastructure is comprised of more than 280 sites across 50 countries offering around 80,000 CPUs, and more than 20 Petabytes of storage space. The infrastructure is available to users on 24/7 basis, achieving a sustained workload of approximately 250,000 jobs/day (data as of Feb 2009).

A trusted federation of Certification Authorities (EUGridPMA - http://www.eugridpma.org/) manages the issuing of credentials to the EGEE users, and this federation belongs to a worldwide network of trust called International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF). IGTF provides the basis for a world-wide interoperable Grid infrastructure. EGEE is actively involved in the Open Grid Forum (OGF -http://www.ogf.org) promoting the adoption of common standards in the Grid domain, and above all being involved in the GIN working group (Grid Interoperability Now). The EGEE Applications community is represented by around 200 registered virtual organizations, covering a variety of different disciplines like Bioinformatics, Chemistry, High Energy Physics, Fusion Physics, Health Science and Medicine, Life Science, Astrophysics, Earth Science, Earth Observation, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computer Science. The EGEE infrastructure is also used by the WLCG project, the World Wide LCG Computing Grid. EGEE provides a distributed computing infrastructure for the data analysis of the huge amount of data provided by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research. EGEE also collaborates with a number of similar projects, such as geographical expansions to areas around Europe, such as SEE-GRID in South Eastern Europe, BalticGrid in the Baltic Region and Eumedgrid in the Mediterranean basin. In addition, its middleware is used by different application projects such as DILIGENT[15] (Digital Libraries) and BionfoGRID (http://www.bioinfogrid.eu/) (BioInformatics).

There are also a lot of support projects with which EGEE has special collaboration, such as ICEAGE (http://www.iceage-eu.org/v2/index.cfm) (dealing with Grid education) and ETICS (http://etics.web.cern.ch/etics/), a software management quality project, on which the EGEE middleware (gLite) is integrated, built, quality assessed and released. The Nordic European Countries are federated in two major Grid projects: The Nordic DataGrid Facility and NorduGrid.

In essentially all European countries, parallel to the national contribution to EGEE and other international Grid projects, National Grid Initiatives (NGI) have been set up, which are relevant actors to coordinate at national level the development and deployment of Grid middleware and infrastructures. NGIs will be coordinated for the establishment of a long-living permanent European Grid Initiative, whose scope is much longer than the short-living projects on Grids. The EGI Design Study (http://web.eu-egi.eu/) project is an effort to study the establishment of a permanent sustainable grid infrastructure, commonly referred to as the European Grid Infrastructure EGI, in Europe. It is planned that EGI will take over at the end of phase three of EGEE, which is starting in spring 2008 and lasting until spring 2010. EGI is expected to allow interoperability among the NGIs and the existing deployed middleware distributions, coordinating the national efforts on Grid computing infrastructures. NGIs will be coordinated for the establishment of a long-living permanent European Grid Initiative, whose scope is much longer than the short-living projects on Grids. The EGI Design Study (http://web.eu-egi.eu/)project is an effort to study the establishment of a permanent sustainable grid infrastructure, commonly referred to as the European Grid Infrastructure EGI, in Europe. It is planned that EGI will take over at the end of phase three of EGEE, which is starting in spring 2008 and lasting until spring 2010. EGI is expected to allow interoperability among the NGIs and the existing deployed middleware distributions, coordinating the national efforts on Grid computing.