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of researchers from around the world who con-
duct research in diverse scientific domains. The
networking backbone of EGEE is provided by
GÉANT and the NRENs. In this section we use
the acronym EGEE to refer to EGEE-III and its
predecessors - EGEE-I and EGEE-II.
The achievements of this project are aptly
demonstrated by statistics pertaining to the EGEE
infrastructure and its users. As of July 2009, 290
sites in over 50 counties are connected to the EGEE
infrastructure and they provided approximately
144,000 processing cores to its users. It provides
a disk storage capacity and long-term tape storage
of approximately 25 petabytes and 38 petabytes
respectively. In terms of the users of the EGEE
infrastructure, approximately 17,000 researchers
belonging to around 120 virtual organisations (or-
ganisations comprising of multiple stakeholders
that virtually collaborate on an e-Science project)
use this resource. The application domains making
use of the EGEE infrastructure includes archaeol-
ogy, astronomy & astrophysics, civil protection,
computational chemistry, computational fluid
dynamics, computer science/tools, condensed
matter physics, earth sciences, finance, fusion,
geophysics, high-energy physics, life sciences,
multimedia and material sciences (EGEE, 2009).
The success of EGEE is paving the way for
a sustainable pan-European grid infrastructure.
EGEE has been instrumental in implementing a
hierarchal structure for efficient management of
grid resources in member counties. This has been
achieved through the EGEE consortium and the
National Grid Initiatives (NGIs). The NGIs use
their respective NRENs for providing intercon-
nectivity between the grid resources deployed at
the national level. The EGEE consortium consists
of 42 beneficiaries from academia and industry.
However, in real terms, these 42 beneficiaries
represent more than 120 partners since the member
countries have grouped their academic partners
on a national level through the NGIs. These NGIs
are an important milestone in the transition of the
EGEE infrastructure to a sustainable operational
model - the European Grid Initiative (EGI). The
EGI is a partnership between the NGIs and a
coordinating body, the EGI Organisation (EGI.
eu). It is expected that by the year 2010, the
resources currently coordinated by EGEE will
be managed through the EGI and each country's
grid infrastructure will be run by their respective
NGIs (EGEE, 2009).
DEISA-2: The Pan-European
Supercomputer
The Distributed European Infrastructure for Super-
computing Applications (DEISA) is a consortium
of leading national supercomputing centres that
aims at fostering the pan-European world-leading
computational science research. DEISA-1, and
now DEISA-2 (funded by EU FP7), is paving
the way towards the deployment of a cooperative
European High Performance Computing (HPC)
ecosystem (DEISA, 2009). In the remainder of
this section, we use the acronym DEISA to refer
to these projects.
The DEISA infrastructure is based on a tight
coupling of eleven national supercomputing
centres from seven European countries, using
dedicated network 10 Gbps interconnections of
GÉANT and the NRENs. The aggregated power
of the DEISA supercomputing resources exceeds
one PetaFlop per second. DEISA is structured
as a layer on top of the national supercomputing
services and provides generalised interfaces and
services that allow users to access and utilise this
pool of computing resources in a consistent and
efficient manner. The HPC infrastructure and ser-
vices offered by DEISA thus combines, for its users
and the user communities it serves, the advantage
of having access to a variety of supercomputing
architectures for different computing purposes
with the advantage provided by consistent inter-
faces to these different resources and services.
Accordingly, the profile of using the DEISA HPC
infrastructure and services can be regarded as being
similar to the usage of a monolithic supercomput-
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