EGEE EN
Introduction
Virtual grid computational environment recently followed by development of data depots - together called as Grid - has in the Czech republic a solid base built since 1996. Majority of activities concerning Grids was focused around METACentrum project that has been transformed from initially standalone project of several universities into a part of research plans of CESNET institute. METACentrum currently also participates in many international projects of European union.
Currently the Czech republic represented by CESNET organization is under the umbrella of the sixth EU framework programme focusing to solving of project EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE). The result of EGEE project will be functional European-scale grid infrastructure allowing wide European scientific community to use computational resources of unprecedentedly large range .
EGEE project
Project EGEE brings together experts from many organisations and various countries with the common aim of building on recent advances in grid technology and developing a service grid infrastructure in Europe which is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day.
The project aims to provide researchers in academia and industry with access to major computing resources, independent of their geographic location. The EGEE project will also focus on attracting a wide range of new users to the grid.
The project will primarily concentrate on three four areas:
- to build a consistent, robust and secure grid network that will attract additional computing resources
- to allow easy integration of additional computing resources
- to continuously improve and maintain the middleware in order to deliver a reliable service to users
- 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 GÉANT and exploit grid expertise generated by many EU, national and international Grid projects to date.
Funded by the European Commission, the EGEE project community has been divided into several partner federations, consisting of partner institutions and covering a wide-range of both scientific and industrial applications. Two pilot application domains have been selected to guide the implementation and certify the performance and functionality of the evolving infrastructure. One is the Large Halidron Collider Computing Grid supporting physics experiments and the other is Biomedical Grids, where several communities are facing equally daunting challenges to cope with the flood of bioinformatics and healthcare data.