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Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) is a series of projects funded by the European Commission through the Directorate-General for Information Society and Media. It connects more than 70 institutions in 27 European countries to construct a multi-science computing Grid infrastructure for the European Research Area, allowing researchers to share computing resources. Building on recent developments in computing Grid technology and earlier test-bed projects such as EU DataGrid, its main aims are:
EGEE began in March 2004 under the name "Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe", but changed its name shortly afterwards with the addition of partners in the United States and Asia-Pacific region.
The project was launched using the pre-existing LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project as a springboard. LCG aims to provide computing resources for analysis of data coming from the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva. This project connects High Energy Physics computing resources from across the globe, and is required to process the predicted 15 petabytes of data the LHC will produce each year. EGEE started from this infrastructure, adding more resources from all parts of the globe and attracting users from a number of other communities to form what has become the largest multi-science Grid infrastructure in the world.
EGEE began work using the LCG-2 middleware, provided by the LCG project (but in itself based on the middleware from EU DataGrid, EGEE’s predecessor). In parallel it produced the gLite middleware, reengineered using components from a number of sources to produce lightweight middleware that provides a full range of basic Grid services.
The gLite middleware is also used by a number of groups outside of EGEE such as the EC funded DILIGENT. The French space agency CNES also has plans to deploy gLite in the future.
In 2008 EGEE operates more than 250 sites, from a mixture of research centres, Universities, companies and other interested bodies. Originally in Europe, the infrastructure now features sites in the Americas and Asia-Pacific region in addition to these original resources. These sites provide some 100,000 CPUs , with the number expected to rise considerably as further machines are put in place to process data from new internationally collaborative scientific projects.
The infrastructure runs on a wide range of different hardware, but at present all computers in the EGEE infrastructure run the CERN version of Scientific Linux.
EGEE was due to end on 31 March 2006, but a follow up project, EGEE-II, was started with the European Commission on 1 April 2006. EGEE-II has a larger consortium, with 91 contracting partners and 48 non-contracting partners from 32 countries, as well as expanded support for non-European participants and application communities. EGEE-II features a refocused middleware effort, increasing the integration of components from outside sources and putting more effort into integration and testing activities. The second phase ended on 30 April 2008.
The third EGEE project runs from 1 May 2008 to 30 April 2010 co-funded by the European Commission following on from the extended EGEE II project without a break. The key objectives of this project are to expand the existing EGEE infrastructure by including more resources and, particularly, more scientific user communities, and to prepare for the migration from a project-based model to a sustainable federated infrastructure based on National Grid Initiatives.
It is planned that the European Grid Initiative will take over the e-infrastructure from EGEE after the end of the EGEE III project. The series of EGEE projects has supported the staged development of a European e-infrastructure supported by co-funding by the European Commission. However, this arrangement cannot continue indefinitely because the European Commission does not wish to fund it indefinitely, and because the e-infrastructure needs to establish a governance structure centred on its users and resource providers in the member states. The EGI has been designed to provide such a stable, sustainable governance structured around the National Grid Initiatives of the member states. This sustainable, federal structure will allow the EGI to become the core e-infrastructure for the European Research Area.