GOVERNMENT

Next week, 1-3 March 2006, the Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) project will hold the first User Forum event at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. This will bring together the established EGEE user community as well as new users from academia and industry to share their experiences and set new targets for the future. The event coincides with a significant milestone for the EGEE project, as the total processing power achieved by this Grid infrastructure now exceeds 20,000 CPUs on average. Discussions at the Forum will focus on the evolution of existing scientific applications which have been ‘gridified’ to work on this infrastructure, as well as development and deployment of new Grid middleware and new applications, in fields such as Life Sciences, Earth Observations, Computational Chemistry, Astroparticle and Particle Physics, Fusion and others. The EGEE project coordinates the largest multi-science Grid infrastructure in the world and has attracted a diverse and growing number of user communities in the first two years of the project. Some of these will demonstrate their use of the Grid and its benefits on-line during the User Forum event. The presentation sessions will give an overview of the current status of applications, infrastructure and Grid software. In parallel working groups, users will discuss the added value of Grids for scientific and industrial applications and review key Grid services required for their applications. Other working groups will bring together experts in Grid technologies with academic and industrial Grid users developing high-level services on EGEE, to discuss the future evolution of applications and the Grid infrastructure that they will require. The EGEE User Forum, which has attracted over 200 people, kicks off a series of planned user events to take place during the second two-year phase of the EGEE project, called EGEE-II. Negotiations for EGEE-II with the EU are well advanced, after the project successfully passed its second review by EU-appointed Grid experts in December 2005. The second phase of EGEE is due to begin on 1 April 2006, to ensure a seamless service to current EGEE users. "IBM Grid strategist Jean-Pierre Prost (IBM Products & Solutions Support Center, Montpellier, France) said, “this event marks the beginning of a new phase in the evolution of scientific Grids. The underlying infrastructure is now in place, and increasingly, real users – both academic and industrial – will be driving the further development of the technology, with their expanding range of requirements for scientific computing and data processing using Grid technology.” To provide a comprehensive Grid infrastructure and service to its growing user community, EGEE is also supporting several related projects, also funded by the EU, that have just been launched. These will extend the Grid infrastructure to new geographic areas, such as the Baltic region, Latin America, China and North Africa. Several related projects will deal with specific sets of applications and their requirements, such as Grids for child health applications. Specific support projects will further contribute to the development of the Grid, enhancing the effectiveness of the infrastructure, for example in the area of IT security. EGEE also continues to participate actively in the Global Grid Forum (GGF), for example through Multi Grid Interoperability (MGI) efforts. The 16th GGF meeting was hosted by the lead partner of EGEE’s South-Eastern federation, GRNET, in Athens last week. The next major EGEE event will be the EGEE’06 conference, 25-29 September 2006, in Geneva, Switzerland which will highlight the wide range of related projects that EGEE has helped generate, and the broad spectrum of user communities involved.