Brussels, 04 Oct 2006
The EU funded 'enabling Grids for e-science' (EGEE) project is processing more than 30,000 computing jobs a day - over a million a month - making it the world's largest scientific grid infrastructure. Launched in 2004, the EGEE infrastructure involves 91 institutional partners in 32 countries across Europe, Asia, and USA, and is linked by Europe's GEANT2 high-speed communications network and similar networks around the world.
Computing tasks are carried out by scientists from diverse fields of research, and range from simulations of molecular docking for neglected diseases to geophysical analysis of oil and gas fields. Clusters of hundreds and even thousands of computers are put to work to perform calculations, using in total over 25,000 central processor units (CPUs) and several million gigabytes of data storage in disk and tape facilities.
The EGEE has recently been made interoperable with other national and international science grids like the Open Science Grid in the US ands NAREGI in Japan. The project partners say that this latest development is in keeping with the original vision to establish a common Grid infrastructure for computer sharing similar to what the World Wide Web did for information sharing.
In addition to scientific applications, the EGEE team is also seeking
to extend the infrastructure's services to industry. So far three
companies have signed up as the first EGEE Business Associates (EBAs) to
work with the project to make the distributed computing infrastructure of
the Grid more user-friendly, effective and secure in an industrial
context. 'EGEE is now in a position that it has much to offer to
business,' says Project Director Dr Bob Jones. 'The EBA programme is an
important component in our strategy for the take-up of our work by
business and industry, providing a framework in which companies can
confidently move ahead with the adoption of Grid technologies.'Further
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