Enabling Grids for e-Science: The EGEE Project - Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Applications - page 54

3.1
Modern science is increasingly dependent on information and communi-
cation technologies, analyzing huge amounts of data (in the terabyte and
petabyte range), running large-scale simulations requiring thousands of
CPUs, and sharing results between different research groups. This collab-
orative way of doing science has led to the creation of virtual organizations
(VOs) that combine researches and resources (instruments, computing,
data) across traditional administrative and organizational domains [1].
Advances in networking and distributed computing techniques have
enabled the establishment of such virtual organizations and more and
more scientii c disciplines are using this concept, which is also referred to
as “grid” computing [2-4].
The past years have shown the benei t of basing grid computing on a
well-managed infrastructure federating the network, storage, and com-
pute resources across different institutions and making them available to
different scientii c communities via well-dei ned protocols and interfaces
exposed by a software layer (grid middleware). This kind of federated
infrastructure is referred to as “e-Infrastructure” and Europe, through
ambitious national research and infrastructure programs [5] as well as
dedicated programs of the European Commission, is playing a leading
role in building multinational, multidisciplinary e-Infrastructures and
has devised a roadmap for a pan-European e-Infrastructure [6].
Initially, these efforts were driven by academic proof-of-concept and test-
bed projects, such as the European Data Grid project [7], but have since
developed into large-scale, production e-Infrastructures supporting numer-
ous scientii c communities. Leading these efforts is a small number of large-
scale l agship projects, mostly co-funded by the European Commission,
which take the collected results of predecessor projects forward into new
areas. Among these l agship projects, the EGEE (Enabling Grids for
E-sciencE) project unites thematic, national, and regional grid initiatives in
order to provide an e-Infrastructure available to all scientii c research in
Europe and beyond in support of the European Research Area [8].
The project is a multiphase program started in 2004 and expected to end
in 2010. EGEE has built a pan-European e-Infrastructure that is being
increasingly used by a variety of scientii c disciplines. EGEE has also
expanded to the Americas and Asia Pacii c working toward a worldwide
e-Infrastructure. EGEE currently federates some 250 resource centers from
48 countries providing over 50,000 CPUs and several petabytes of storage.
The infrastructure is routinely being used by over 5000 users forming
some 200 VOs and running over 140,000 jobs per day. EGEE users come
from disciplines as diverse as archaeology, astronomy, astrophysics, com-
putational chemistry, earth science, i nance, fusion, geophysics, high-
energy physics, life sciences, material sciences, and many more.

Introduction