EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe) aims to integrate current national, regional and thematic computing and data Grids to create a European Grid-empowered infrastructure for the support of the European Research Area, exploiting unique expertise generated by previous EU projects (DataGrid, Crossgrid, DataTAG, etc) and national Grid initiatives (UK e-Science, INFN Grid, Nordugrid, US Trillium, etc).
The EGEE consortium involves 70 leading institutions in 27 countries, federated in regional Grids, with a combined capacity of over 20000 CPUs, the largest international Grid infrastructure ever assembled.
The EGEE vision is to provide distributed European research communities with a common market of computing, offering round-the-clock access to major computing resources, independent of geographic location, building on the EU Research Network Geant and NRNs. EGEE will support common Grid computing needs, integrate the computing infrastructures of these communities and agree on common access policies. The resulting infrastructure will surpass the capabilities of localised clusters and individual supercomputing centres, providing a unique tool for collaborative computer and data intensive e-Science. EGEE will work to provide interoperability with other major Grid initiatives such as the US NSF Cyber infrastructure, establishing a worldwide Grid infrastructure.
EGEE is a two-year project in a four-year programme. Major implementation milestones after two years will provide the basis for assessing subsequent objectives and funding needs. Two pilot applications areas have been selected to guide the implementation and certify the performance of EGEE: the Particle Physics LHC Grid (LCG), where the computing model is based exclusively on a Grid infrastructure to store and analyse petabytes of data from experiments at CERN;