Who wants to be a Grid millionaire?

The worlds largest scientific Grid has reached a major milestone, dealing with over a million programs each month for the last six months. Scientists submitting programs to the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project range from biochemists simulating drugs for malaria to geophysicists analysing oil and gas fields. UK sites play a key role in EGEE, running around a fifth of all the programs this year.

Twenty-one sites at universities and research centres around the UK are part of the EGEE Grid, contributing nearly five thousand central processing units (CPUs). Dr Robin Middleton of CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire is a former Chair of the EGEE management board. He comments, "From the latest figures, its clear that EGEE now runs a Grid thats being used extensively by scientists in the UK and worldwide. We're very pleased that the UK can play such a major role in this ground-breaking project".

The EGEE Grid has clusters of hundreds and even thousands of PCs, in institutes and universities around the world in total over 25,000 CPUs are involved. Several million gigabytes of data storage in disk and tape facilities also contribute to make EGEE the worlds largest scientific Grid infrastructure.

In the UK, particle physicists from the GridPP project are among the major providers and users of the Grid. Robert Aymar, Director General of CERN, the worlds largest particle physics laboratory, emphasized the importance of this Grid infrastructure. "We are just over one year away from the anticipated launch of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, based at CERN. We expect this device will open up new horizons in particle physics," said Dr. Aymar. "Thousands of physicists around the world will need to use the Grid to access and analyse their data. The EGEE infrastructure is a key element in making the LHC Computing Grid possible, and thus the success of the LHC is linked to the success of the EGEE project".

Overall, the EGEE project now involves 91 institutional partners in Europe, the U.S.A, Russia and Asia. The project has produced a production-quality Grid middleware distribution called gLite, which ensures the seamless operation of this global computing facility. A round-the-clock service ensures this Grid infrastructure is always available.

The EGEE project also offers training courses in Grid computing in collaboration with over 30 partner institutions across Europe and Asia. This training activity is coordinated by the UK National e-Science Centre, which is based in Edinburgh. Over 3500 participants have attended training courses since the inception of the EGEE project.

In addition to scientific applications, EGEE has targeted a range of business applications for support, including financial analysis. Recently, successful demonstrations have been made of interoperation with other major national and international Grids, such as the Open Science Grid in the US and NAREGI in Japan. These achievements hasten the original vision of Grid computing, which is to establish a common Grid infrastructure for sharing computing and storage resources, similar to the World Wide Webs information sharing capabilities.


Posted by: Edwin    Source