UK Leads Europe Across The Grid
Mon 12 Jul 2010
The Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) project closed on 30 April 2010. The project brought together a computing infrastructure, software tools and services to support more than 10,000 scientific researchers across more than 170 research communities. During the two year term GridPP played a key role in EGEE's success, being the biggest national contributor of computing resources.
EGEE’s achievements grew from the pioneering European DataGrid project, which started in 2001 and developed continuously through the three successive project phases of EGEE. GridPP was the UK's contribution to EGEE, with 19 sites across the country delivering computing power to thousands of researchers using the grid. The UK contributed over 187 billion hours of CPU time, which is 17% of the total supplied by the infrastructure. This put the UK just ahead of France and the combined German/Swiss region
Alongside providing unparalled computing power to researchers, one of EGEE’s biggest successes was fostering collaborations within Europe and worldwide. To maintain these collaborations a new organisation EGI.eu based in Amsterdam has been set up to coordinate the European Grid Infrastructure, EGI. As a part of the EGI GridPP and it's partner organisation the NGS, have formed a National Grid Infrastructure, NGI, for the UK which will oversee grid activities across the country.
David Britton, GridPP's Project Leader, praised the success of EGEE “While GridPP's focus has been on the data flowing from the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) we have always been happy to share our resources with other researchers. EGEE has been instrumental in both of these tasks, supplying a lot of the processing power for the LHC data while still making the grid accessible to a broad range of disciplines. In the future I hope to see the EGI/NGI structure build on this and extend the benefits of a Europe-wide common grid infrastructure to as many other scientists as possible.”
With the LHC up and running and EGI coming up to full speed, GridPP, and the UK, will continue to be an integral member of the drive to provide grid resources to as many scientists across the globe.
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