INDUSTRY

The fourth conference of the Enabling Grid for E-sciencE (EGEE) project will be held in Pisa, Italy, from October 24 to 28 2005. The EGEE project provides the world’s largest Grid infrastructure of its kind, and is Europe’s flagship Research Infrastructures initiative, supporting six scientific fields and running more than 20 different applications. The EGEE conference in Pisa also coincides with a major milestone for the project: by October, 2 million jobs had been successfully run on the project’s infrastructure this year alone. Reaching 2 million jobs in only 10 months is a key achievement for the project, which aims to build a working infrastructure for scientists to use in their day to day work. In combination with “Service Challenges” which test the basic Grid infrastructure, and “Data Challenges”, which test individual applications, reaching this 2 million job milestone helps demonstrate the robust and reliable service that EGEE provides. The fourth EGEE conference will be held at the Palazzo dei Congressi, and hosted by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in the center of the historic city of Pisa, and will feature prestigious peakers from the international scientific and IT community, local authorities and the European Commission. The theme of this event, “Global and Persistent e-Infrastructure for Scientific Knowledge in the 21st Century”, will be explored during the course of the week through plenary sessions as well as more focused parallel discussions. It will also feature demonstrations of many of the applications supported by EGEE and discussions with Industry on the commercial future of the Grid. These varied discussions will give the members of the project and their guests the opportunity to discuss a wide range of issues related to Grid computing and multi-science research infrastructures. The fourth EGEE conference will also be the farewell to Project Director Fabrizio Gagliardi, who is leaving the project to take a senior position in the IT industry. Dr Gagliardi is being succeeded at the head of the project by Dr Bob Jones, the current Technical Director of EGEE. With six months left before the end of the EGEE project, it has already exceeded many of the goals set for its 24 month lifespan. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of work still to be done to consolidate the infrastructure and find new users, so the members of the project are already looking to the future. An expanded consortium recently submitted a proposal for a successor, the EGEE-II project, to the European Commission, who have invited the project for hearings in November this year. The EGEE-II consortium features many new partners including some from the United States and Asia, and hopes to begin EGEE-II in April 2006. EGEE-II will continue the work of EGEE in building an international computing infrastructure for science, extending this infrastructure to areas such as the Baltic countries, Latin America, China and India through related projects. It will also increase the number of scientific disciplines it supports, with plans to include fusion science as well as continuing to look for new communities with high performance computing needs.