INDUSTRY

The EDGeS infrastructure that connects Desktop Grids to EGEE and other Service Grids, announced that the total number of computers connected to  the Desktop Grids in EDGeS, has surpassed the 100,000. This milestone shows there are significant additional computational resources available to European scientists that are connected to EGEE via the Bridge technology of EDGeS. The combined size of the Grids interconnected in this way is now over 250.000 processors - one of the largest European computational infrastructures.

The Desktop Grids that collect volunteer resources to EDGeS:

The largest of these systems are based on BOINC technology, while others use XtremWebHEP-E technology developed by INRIA and IN2P3. The EDGeS developed 3G Bridge allows scientists to use more computational power for their applications and send their work to the best suited infrastructure.  This way they can reduce the time that is needed to get answers to their scientific problems and also ensure the more efficient utilization of IT resources.

The EDGeS project already ported and installed over 20 applications to the combined infrastructure. This includes medical applications - Patient Readmission; Protein Simulation; Blender Video rendering; and Fusion research.

"Reaching a milestone of 100.000 computers in Desktop Grids to EGEE through the EDGeS bridge, shows there is a large computing capacity that can be made available to European researchers", said Peter Kacsuk, EDGeS project coordinator." And this is just the beginning: there are millions of computers of citizens in Europe that could be connected."

"EGEE has a goal to make as many resources as possible available to European researchers," says Bob Jones, EGEE Project Director. "Connecting with volunteer grid systems is a key part of our strategy."

The Desktop Grids in EDGeS connect computers from citizens at home and from companies and other organisations. Once joint, citizens can donate otherwise unused computing time to science. Not only do they help science with this, it also contributes to Green IT, because there is no need to build new large computer centres in several cases.

Computers at home can be very useful for a number of scientific application areas. Especially those that do large parameter study based simulation or analysis.

More information is available on the EDGeS website at http://edges-grid.eu .