INDUSTRY

EGEE, Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, entered its second phase in April. This very successful project has been providing an international Grid computing infrastructure since 2004 and will continue to do so for at least another two years, commencing on April 1st. As for the first phase, it is being coordinated by CERN and co-funded by the European Commission and national funding agencies through partner institutes. "We are all very happy about the smooth start of the second phase of EGEE," said Project Director Bob Jones. "The project builds on the successes of its first two years and now we are focussing on stability of the deployed infrastructure. Growing beyond our pilot application areas of HEP and biomedicine, we now see increasing use by researchers from other fields. Recently we've added finance and fusion to the list of disciplines we support, and we are always looking for new users." The UK has had a large involvement in EGEE since the beginning. The original four contracting partners has grown and now includes CCLRC, NeSC (University of Edinburgh), Imperial College London, University of Glasgow, University of Oxford and University of Manchester. "EGEE is at the same time both about building an international computing infrastructure and about its exploitation by scientific communities" said Robin Middleton, UK-Ireland representative on the EGEE Management Board. "Within the UK we are looking to expand the number of research areas for which EGEE can be of direct benefit." Conceived as a four year project, EGEE started in April 2004 concentrating on two scientific fields, high energy physics and life sciences. In this initial phase it grew to cover numerous disciplines, from geology to computational chemistry, and now has 30,000 CPUS at over 200 sites around the world. The EGEE project brings together scientists and engineers from more than 90 institutions in 39 countries world-wide to provide a seamless Grid infrastructure for e-Science that is available for scientists 24 hours-a-day. More information on EGEE can be found at its web site.