Whereas the Web is a service for sharing information over the Internet, the Grid is a service for sharing computer power, storage capacity, data and knowledge over the Internet. The Grid goes well beyond simple communication between computers, and aims ultimately to turn the global network of computers into one vast computational resource.

EGEE project brings together experts from over 40 countries with the common aim of building on recent advances in Grid technology and developing a service Grid infrastructure which is available to scientists and companies 24 hours-a-day. The project provides researchers in academia and industry with access to a production level Grid infrastructure, independent of their geographic location. The EGEE project also focuses on attracting a wide range of new users to the Grid.

The EGEE project concentrates on some core areas:

• To continuously improve and maintain the middleware in order to deliver a reliable service to users.
• To attract new users from industry as well as science and ensure they receive the high standard of training and support they need.
• To combine national, regional and thematic Grid efforts, for a seamless Grid infrastructure for scientific research and to build a sustainable Grid for business research and industry.

EDGeS - Enabling Desktop Grids for e-Science - is a European project with the aim of creating an integrated Grid infrastructure that seamlessly integrates a variety of Desktop Grids with EGEE type of service Grids.

The targets of the project are user communities that require large computing power not available or accessible in current scientific e-Infrastructures. In order to support the specific needs of these scientific and other communities The consortium will interconnect the largest European Service Grid infrastructure (EGEE) with existing Desktop Grid (DG) systems in a strong partnership with the EGEE consortium. Service Grids (SG) are more flexible and can accommodate a broader variety of applications than Desktop Grids, however, their setup and maintenance require more efforts, highly skilled IT specialist, and dedicated resources. On the other hand, Desktop Grids are currently restricted solely to a subclass of compute-intensive applications but these easy-to-scale systems are able to collect 1-2 orders of magnitude more compute power by utilizing the involved spare and volunteer IT resources at a fraction of the cost. Making a bridge between these two types of Grid systems will enable the users to transparently execute applications on any arbitrary platform involved in the new infrastructure. Taking the advantages of both approaches the EDGeS infrastructure will represent a major step towards a European wide scientific grid where extremely large number of resources could be integrated to support grand-challenge scientific and other applications. The involvement of low-cost volunteer Desktop Grids into the European scientific grid infrastructure will contribute to the establishment of a sustainable European Grid infrastructure. The consortium is to extend the potential user communities for both beyond traditional scientists and current volunteer computing participants to further involve citizens, school students, and company employees, giving them an opportunity to become involved in science and to apply Grid technology in their every day life. In order to meet these objectives the project will connect Desktop Grid based city Grids, school grids and enterprise grids with EGEE.


Sources and further reading:

GridCafe »

Enabling Grids for E-sciencE »

Enabling Desktop Grids for Ee-Science »