VISUALIZATION

European plans for Grid technology change gear this week, as the pioneering European DataGrid (EDG) project comes to a successful end and a new project, the Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe (EGEE) project, begins. The EGEE project will build on the success of the EDG project and take Grid technology even further by establishing a service Grid infrastructure which is available across Europe, 24 hours-a-day. The European DataGrid (EDG) project, which started three years ago, successfully concluded on 31 March 2004. Aimed at taking a major step towards making the concept of a world-wide computing Grid a reality, the goal of EDG was to build a test computing infrastructure capable of providing shared data and computing resources across the European scientific community. The budget for the project was around ten million Euros and 21 partner institutes and organisations across Europe were involved, including scientific institutes and industrial partners. “We express our full satisfaction with the overall performance and all the achievements of the projects during the entire project period of three years”, was the concluding remark of the EU reviewers, who officially declared the end of the project after analysing in detail its final results. After a massive software development effort involving seven major software releases over three years, the final version of EDG software is already in use in three major scientific fields: High Energy Physics, Biomedical applications and Earth Observations. In High Energy Physics, it is the basis of the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG) infrastructure, which relies on Grid technology to store and analyse petabytes of real and simulated data from experiments at the CERN ’ LHC. The software is also exploited by ten bio-medical applications and five earth observation institutes. At peak performance, the EDG test bed shared more than 1000 computers and more than 15 Terabytes (1 Terabyte = 1012 bytes) of data at 25 sites across Europe, Russia and Taiwan. Grid resources were continuously provided to a user community numbering 500 scientists, organised in 12 virtual organizations. Recently, the EDG software has been approved by the Open Source Initiative Corporation, which makes it an internationally recognised open source licence. In line with EU advice to capitalise as extensively as possible on the experience and achievements of the EDG project, many of its products and the infrastructure will form the starting point for the new EGEE project. Officially beginning on 1 April 2004, the aim of the EGEE project is build on the recent advances in grid technology and develop a Grid infrastructure across Europe that will be available 24 hours-a-day. The project will primarily concentrate on three core areas. The first area is to build a consistent, robust and secure grid network. The second area is to continuously improve and maintain the middleware in order to deliver a reliable service to users. The third area is to attract new users from industry as well as science and ensure they receive the high standard of training and support they need. The Grid will be built on the EU Research Network GEANT and exploit Grid expertise generated by many EU, national and international Grid projects to date. The EGEE project community has been divided into 12 partner “federations”, consisting of 70 partner institutions and covering a wide-range of both scientific and industrial applications. Two pilot areas have been selected to guide the implementation and certify the performance and functionality of the evolving infrastructure. One is the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid and the other is Biomedical Grids, where several communities are facing equally daunting challenges to cope with the flood of bioinformatics and healthcare data. Fabrizio Gagliardi, former DataGrid Project Leader and Project Director of EGEE, said: “Whereas EDG provided European scientists with the first convincing large-scale demonstrations of a functioning Data Grid, EGEE will make the technology available on a regular and reliable basis to all of European science, as well as industrial Research and Development. Like the World Wide Web, which was initially conceived at CERN for rather specialised scientific purposes, the impact of this emerging Grid technology on European society is difficult to predict in detail at this stage, but it is likely to be huge.” EGEE is a two-year project conceived as part of a four-year programme, where the results of the first two years will provide the basis for assessing subsequent objectives and funding needs.