INDUSTRY

EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) has announced a major milestone, with its Grid handling over a million jobs each month for the last six months. UK sites played a key role, running around a fifth of all the jobs this year. As well as particle physicists, scientists submitting jobs range from biochemists simulating drugs for malaria to geophysicists analysing oil and gas fields. Twenty-one sites in the UK are part of the EGEE Grid, contributing nearly five thousand CPUs. Robin Middleton of GridPP is a former Chair of the EGEE Project Management Board. He comments, "From the latest figures, it's clear that EGEE now runs a Grid that's being used extensively by scientists in the UK and worldwide. We're very pleased that the UK can play such a major role in this ground-breaking project." Several million gigabytes of data storage in disk and tape facilities also contribute to make EGEE the world's largest scientific Grid infrastructure. The EGEE Grid has clusters of hundreds and even thousands of PCs, in institutes and universities around the world - in total over 25,000 CPUs are involved. In the UK, particle physicists from GridPP are among the major providers and users of the EGEE Grid. Robert Aymar, Director General of CERN, emphasized the importance of this Grid infrastructure. "We are just over one year away from the anticipated launch of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, based at CERN. We expect this device will open up new horizons in particle physics", said Dr. Aymar. "Thousands of physicists around the world will need to use the Grid to access and analyse their data. The EGEE infrastructure is a key element in making the LHC Computing Grid possible, and thus the success of the LHC is linked to the success of the EGEE project." Overall, the EGEE project now involves 91 institutional partners in Europe, the U.S.A, Russia and Asia. The project has produced a production-quality Grid middleware distribution called gLite, which ensures the seamless operation of this global computing facility. A round-the-clock service ensures this Grid infrastructure is always available. The EGEE project also offers training courses in Grid computing in collaboration with over 30 partner institutions across Europe and Asia. This training activity is coordinated by the UK National e-Science Centre, which is based in Edinburgh. Over 3500 participants have attended training courses since the inception of the EGEE project. In addition to scientific applications, EGEE has targeted a range of business applications for support, including financial analysis. Recently, successful demonstrations have been made of interoperation with other major national and international Grids, such as the Open Science Grid in the US and NAREGI in Japan. These achievements hasten the original vision of Grid computing, which is to establish a common Grid infrastructure for sharing computing and storage resources, similar to the World Wide Web's information sharing capabilities.