EGEE Project: Science on the grid May 19, 2008

(EGEE: http://www.eu-egee.org ) is a leading player in the Grid, a new computing paradigm providing on demand, location independent access to very large scale computing resources. EGEE operates the world’s largest multi-science production Grid infrastructure. As the flagship project of the European Commission, EGEE unites regional and national Grid infrastructures into a seamless whole, able to support scientists in their research 24/7. The users of the EGEE Grid are organised into Virtual Organizations, allowing them to share resources, codes, data and common tools specific to their fields of study. At present, more than 200 Virtual Organizations make use of EGEE, in fields from High Energy Physics and Biomedicine to Earth Sciences, Astronomy, Gaming and Finance. The EGEE infrastructure includes 250 sites in 48 countries spanning Europe, Russia, Asia and the Americas and handles more than 100,000 application executions per day. EGEE actively pursues interoperability with collaborating projects in the USA (Open Science Grid and TeraGrid), Japan (NAREGI) as well as India and China.
Coming to the end of its second phase, EGEE is looking toward the future of the programme and of Grid computing in general. The third phase of the EGEE project is planned to start in May’08 with increased support for new scientific disciplines joining the Grid and preparing for the transition to a permanent, sustainable infrastructure.

About CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (http://www.cern.ch) is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature. The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1990. The Web, as it is affectionately called, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather a focus for an extensive community that now includes about 60 countries and about 8000 scientists. Although these scientists typically spend some time on the CERN site, they usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Good contact is clearly essential. The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.

Biography of the Speaker

Dr Jones is the project director of the European Commission financed EGEE project, which provides a production grid facility for e-Science in Europe. Previous experience in the grid arena includes his mandate as technical coordinator and then deputy project leader for the EU DataGrid project (2001-2004), the flagship grid project of the European Commission in its 5th Framework Programme. Following a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science from Staffordshire University, Bob joined CERN in 1986 as a software developer with the information technology department providing support for the physics experiments running on the LEP particle accelerator. He completed his PhD thesis in Computer Science at Sunderland University while working at CERN and has been involved in several research projects for the future LHC accelerator. He is a member of the ATLAS physics experiment collaboration and has previously been responsible for the online software group. Dr Jones has lectured on software engineering related subjects at events such as the CERN School of computing.