Enabling Grids for E-sciencE

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Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) is a project funded by the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme through Directorate F: Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures, of the Directorate-General for Information Society and Media. It connects more than 70 institutions in 27 European countries to construct a multi-science Grid infrastructure for the European Research Area. Building on recent developments in Grid Technology and earlier test-bed projects such as EU DataGrid, its main aims are:

  1. To build a secure, reliable and robust Grid infrastructure
  2. To reengineer a light-weight middleware solution, gLite, specifically intended to be used by many different scientific disciplines
  3. To attract, engage and support a wide range of users from science and industry, and provide them with extensive technical and training support.

[edit] Background

EGEE began in March 2004 under the name "Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe", but changed its name shortly afterwards with the addition of partners in the United States and Asia-Pacific region.

The project was launched using the pre-existing LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project as a springboard. LCG aims to provide computing resources for analysis of data coming from the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva. This project connects High Energy Physics computing resources form across the globe, and is required to process the predicted 15 petabytes of data the LHC will produce each year. EGEE started from this infrastructure, adding more resources from all parts of the globe and attracting users from a number of other communities to form what has become the largest multi-science Grid infrastructure in the world.

[edit] Middleware

EGEE began work using the LCG-2 middleware, provided by the LCG project (but in itself based on the middleware from EU DataGrid, EGEE’s predecessor). In parallel it produced the gLite middleware, reengineered using components from a number of sources to produce lightweight middleware that provides a full range of basic Grid services. As of September 2006, gLite is at version 3.0, and comprises some 220 packages arranged in 34 logical deployment modules.

The gLite middleware is also used by a number of groups outside of EGEE such as the EC funded DILIGENT. The French space agency CNES also has plans to deploy gLite in the future.

[edit] Infrastructure

EGEE operates more than 250 sites, from a mixture of research centres, Universities, companies and other interested bodies. Originally in Europe, the infrastructure now features sites in the Americas and Asia-Pacific region in addition to these original resources. These sites provide some 41,000 CPUs, with the number expected to rise considerably in 2007-8 as machines are put in place to process data from the LHC and as the other application domains grow.

The infrastructure runs on a wide range of different hardware, but at present all computers in the EGEE infrastructure run the CERN version of Scientific Linux.

[edit] EGEE-II

EGEE was due to end on 31 March 2006, but a follow up project, EGEE-II, was started with the European Commission on 1 April 2006. EGEE-II has a larger consortium, with 91 contracting partners and 48 non-contracting partners from 32 countries, as well as expanded support for non-European participants and application communities. EGEE-II features a refocused middleware effort, increasing the integration of components from outside sources and putting more effort into integration and testing activities.

[edit] See also

  • EELA (EELA Project: creating a human network between Europe and Latin America)
  • ETICS (eInfrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software)
  • OMII-Europe (Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe)
  • Yaim (Tool to configure Grid Services)

[edit] External links