Mission
Project aims
Project EGEE (curently in its third phase of existence) is aimed to integrate European national, regional and thematically oriented grids into unified European grid infrastructure available for all academic applicants requiring computational or data capacities. At the same time newly formed infrastructure should accelerate possibilities of cooperation at European as well as global scale.
Project has been succesfully defended and on February 29, 2004 a contract between main project holder (CERN) and EU representatives has been signed.
The goal of EGEE project is to make these capacities available for the widest community of scientific workers in Europe by simple and easily controllable way. Besides the community of physicists who require Grid as necessary tool to process data from particle physics experiments, scientists and researchers from bioinformatics, medical informatics or image processing from Earth observation field primarily form the core of EGEE users.
Project EGEE is simultaneously actively looking for other scientific communities to help them with transformation to grid distributed environment. Part of the project is also finding optimal structure of managment and maintenance of large parallel system, which is unique worldwide.
Project organization
Project itself is organized into several interconnected activities. Besides the operation of European Grid and activities concerning users education and information dissemination there are four developer activities:
- development and integration of grid middleware
- software quality assurance
- security
- specific network services
The CESNET institute (as the only one in Central Europe) was capable to obtain direct financing for one of these activities, concretely - middleware development - covering area of planning and scheduling of jobs and monitoring of their state. The fact that CESNET was considered to be directly involved in the development area shows clearly the quality of CESNET Grid team.
Therefore simultaneously with the entering of the Czech republic in EU we can enjoy the new European widespread infrastructure of large distributed computational systems. The explicit and extensive (the most extensive from all Central Europe) participation of CESNET will allow direct and hand-to-hand utilization of European Grid for all persons interested in this environment in the Czech republic.