The EGEE project officially ended on the 31 March 2006
EGEE II started on 1 April 2006 and the new EGEE website can be found at:
http://www.eu-egee.org
Uses of the EGEE Grid
The EGEE project initially focused on two well-defined application areas; High Energy Physics (HEP) and Biomedical. This was because these fields were already grid-aware and they would serve well as pilots for the development of the various EGEE Grid services.
EGEE has since established a broader portfolio of applications across a wide range of sectors, including Earth Sciences, Astroparticle Physics and Computational Chemistry. The EGEE Generic Applications Advisory Panel (EGAAP) met most recently in Pisa during the Fourth EGEE Conference where they were presented with a number of new applications wishing to utilise the massive potential that the EGEE Grid infrastructure provides. Other fields include Drug Discovery, Hydrology and Cosmology.
The EGEE Project now provides a stable and reliable Grid infrastructure with its own middleware stack, gLite, and as a result more and more applications are coming online all the time.
Who uses the EGEE Grid Infrastructure?
Generally, the EGEE Grid infrastructure is perfect for any scientific research that is difficult, can not be done on a single PC or perhaps that needs calculations that would take impractical lengths of time to compute even in a dedicated cluster of PC's. The EGEE Grid consists of over 10,000 CPU available to use 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in addition to approximately 10 Petabytes of storage.
Having this tool available is changing the way that scientists are working, as new research possibilities are now available thanks to the EGEE Grid Infrastructure. The end use depends on the users' needs, it could be that they need a large storage capacity, or maybe they need the bandwidth that the Infrastructure provides or perhaps it is the sheer computing power available that attracts them.
What is the EGEE Grid Infrastructure being used for?
To date, more than a thousand scientists from all over the world have submitted around 2 million jobs in the first
ten months of 2005. These jobs vary from very short batches to large single computations,
and their results are relating to any one of the scientific areas already mentioned.
The following pages will give you an overview of some of the main players using the EGEE Grid Infrastructure today.
High Energy Physics (HEP) Applications
One of the pilot application areas on which the EGEE infrastructure was developed. In fact, this is one of the original drivers behind the development of Grid technology.
Biomedical Applications
The second pilot application area which was originally used to develop and test the infrastructure, it obviously has different requirements to the HEP field and it has proved a significant area in Grid development and middleware improvements.
Other Applications
Applications which have since been added to the infrastructure in the first phase of the project from other scientific domains. The range of applications which are now supported by the EGEE Infrastructure is quite broad, and it looks set to widen even further as Grid technology becomes more accessible to a larger range of scientific domains.