APPLICATIONS

Users in more than 150 Virtual Organisations from fields as diverse as Biomedicine, Earth Sciences and High-Energy Physics are now using the distributed computing infrastructure of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project, which shows the wide adoption and versatility of this new technology. This was announced at the EGEE'06 conference in Geneva, Switzerland, along with the prize for the two best demonstrations of applications on the Grid shown at the conference. "The choice for the best demo was difficult since there were several very nice ones, so we decided to share the prize," explained Prof. Alan Blatecky, Deputy Director of RENCI and head of the selection committee, at the conference dinner on Wednesday evening. "The Climate Data Analysis shown on EGEE by Kerstin Ronneberger and her colleagues from DKRZ clearly demonstrated how the Grid can speed up analysis of data and modelling. On the other hand, the Dashboard for the ATLAS and CMS LHC experiments by Julia Andreeva and her team at CERN demonstrated a great device for monitoring the status of Grid resources and the applications using them." "We are involved in the Health-e-Child project to build on Grid technology, which has now moved from prototypes to production usage," says Dr Jörg Freund, from Siemens Medical Solutions that sponsored the prize for the best demos. "This enables us to run our clinical decision support systems on a secure and reliable distributed platform. The Grid now provides tools for applications from many different fields - broadening out from the pilot domains using it, and this was successfully demonstrated at EGEE'06." The demonstrations shown at EGEE'06 were just a few examples of the ever growing number of application domains and individual research groups using the processing and data storage capabilities offered by the EGEE Grid. With almost 200 sites in 48 countries and up to 50,000 jobs completed every day, the EGEE project operates the world's largest production-quality scientific Grid infrastructure, available 24 hours a day to the European and global scientific community. Having successfully completed a large number of service and data challenges, this large infrastructure is beginning to meet the needs of modern international scientific collaborations, in both small and large communities. Applications are the life-blood of the EGEE project demonstrating the broad adoption of the infrastructure as a mission-critical computing platform. Dedicated teams within the project support the integration of new scientific communities and their applications with a lightweight registration procedure that minimises obstacles while providing critical contact channels. Users are structured in Virtual Organisations (VOs) that control the access to computing, storage and software resources by their members and negotiate the sharing of resources on behalf of the user group they represent. These efforts have opened up Grid computing from a novel technological solution to a valid and in some cases vital tool for research. Pilot adopters of the Grid come from the fields of high-energy physics and life sciences - domains chosen from the start of the project to guide the development and functionality of the Grid middleware and services. The EGEE Grid User community has grown to include more than 10 domains, ranging from Astrophysics, Computational Chemistry, and Earth Sciences to Fusion. Industry is also showing increasing interest in Grid technology and several industrial applications are already running on the EGEE infrastructure. EGEE'06 is showcasing this remarkable achievement through a packed programme of sessions intended for new and experienced players in the Grid field, end users and members of the commercial sector.