During the Regional Radiocommunication Conference (RRC-06) of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), on 15 May – 16 June, the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project supported a series of large-scale data-processing activities being carried out by the ITU. These took place regularly during the five-week conference so as to map rapidly the consequences of different scenarios being negotiated. The aim was to establish a new frequency plan for digital broadcasting in Europe, Africa, Arab states and the former USSR.
As well as relying on the ITU's own computing system with 100 PCs, several sites of the EGEE infrastructure provided a computing Grid of more than 400 PCs to work on each analysis in parallel. This simultaneous calculation on the Grid not only came up with the same results in a much shorter time than on the local system, but could also provide extra capacity and additional safeguards on the distributed infrastructure. By using a relatively small subset of a few hundred of the estimated 20,000 PCs of the EGEE Grid infrastructure, the most demanding analysis step could be reduced during the conference from about four hours on the local cluster to less than one hour on the Grid.
A major challenge faced by the conference was to find ways for digital and analogue broadcasting to co-exist on the radio-frequency spectrum during the transition period without causing interference. The treaty agreement that was signed as a result of the negotiations heralds the development of all-digital terrestrial broadcast services for sound and television.
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Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel