Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) is the largest multidisciplinary Grid infrastructure in the world, covering research fields from particle physics to biomedicine. Now the project has begun its third phase, EGEE III.
This phase aims to expand and optimize the Grid infrastructure, which is currently used more than 150,000 times per day by scientific users. Co-funded by the European Commission, EGEE III brings together more than 120 organizations to produce a reliable and scalable computing resource available to the European and global research community. At present it consists of 250 sites in 48 countries and more than 60,000 CPUs with more than 20 petabytes of storage, available to some 8000 users 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
These figures considerably exceed the goals planned for the end of the first four years of the EGEE programme, demonstrating the enthusiasm in the scientific community for EGEE and Grid solutions. Ultimately EGEE would like to see a unified, interoperable Grid infrastructure, and with this goal in mind it is working closely with other European and worldwide Grid projects to help to define the standards necessary to make this happen.
The tools and techniques used in one discipline can often be recycled and used elsewhere, by other scientists, or even in the world of business and finance, where EGEE is employed to find new oil reserves, simulate market behaviour and map taxation policy.
EGEE will hold its next conference, EGEE ’08, in Istanbul on 22–26 September 2008. The conference will provide an opportunity for business and academic sectors to network with the EGEE communities, collaborating projects, developers and decision makers, to realize the vision of a sustainable, interoperable European Grid.
