EGEE - An Overview

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project originally began on 1 April 2004. A second two-year phase started on 1 April 2006, and is funded by the European Commission. EGEE's objective is to build on recent advances in grid technology to provide a production grid infrastructure, based on production-quality software, which will be available to scientists 24 hours a day. EGEE will provide academic and industry researchers with access to major and reliable computing resources, independent of geographic location – and it will also attract a range of new users to grid computing.

The EGEE project is among the largest of its kind, with funding from the European Commission of more than 30 million euros. Conceived as part of a four-year programme, the results of the first two years have provided the basis for assessing subsequent objectives and funding requirements for the latter two years.

EGEE is constructed around 13 partner 'federations', comprising more than 90 partner institutions. These federations also cover a wide range of both scientific and industrial applications. Two key pilot applications were originally selected for prioritisation in the early stages of the project, High Energy Physics and Bioinformatics.

• High Energy Physics: The Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid is designed to handle the petabytes of data that will be generated each year by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (due to be switched on in 2007). The first phase of this project (known as LCG-1) is operating a series of prototype services. It uses middleware developed mainly by the DataGrid project, allowing physicists to access worldwide distributed computing resources from their desktops as if they were local resources.
  
  
• Bioinformatics: Biomedical Grids seek to address the needs of several communities, who are facing equally daunting challenges in managing enormous volumes of bioinformatics and healthcare data.

EGEE has since established a broader portfolio of applications across a wide range of sectors, including Astrophysics, Computational Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Finance, Fusion, Geophysics and Multimedia. In addition, there are several applications from the industrial sector running on the EGEE Grid, such as applications from geophysics and the plastics industry.

The grid developed through the EGEE project is being built using the infrastructure of the GÉANT network and the European national research and education networks it connects.

DANTE manages GÉANT, and is also a partner in EGEE. The organisation's main involvement is as a member of the Technical Network Liaison Committee (TNLC), a group made up of EGEE and research network staff which facilitates cooperation between EGEE and the NREN community. DANTE is also contributing to the second service activity (SA2, concerned with network resource provision'), and to other work including: establishing and maintaining relationships between the EGEE NOC (ENOC) and the GÉANT End-to-End Coordination Unit (E2ECU); and investigating the feasibility of a common trouble ticket exchange format.