FAQ

EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) aims to integrate current national, regional and thematic computing and data Grids to create a European Grid-empowered infrastructure for the support of the European Research Area, exploiting unique expertise generated by previous EU projects (DataGrid, CrossGrid, DataTAG, etc) and national Grid initiatives (UK e-Science, INFN Grid, Nordugrid, US Trillium, etc). The EGEE consortium involves 70 leading institutions in 27 countries, federated in regional Grids (CERN, Central Europe, France, Germany/Switzerland, Ireland/UK, Italy, Northern Europe, Russia, South-East Europe, South-West Europe, US), the largest international Grid infrastructure ever assembled.

The EGEE vision is to provide distributed European research communities with a common market of computing, offering round-the-clock access to major computing resources, independent of geographic location. The resulting infrastructure will provide a unique tool for collaborative computer and data intensive e-Science. EGEE will work to provide interoperability with other major Grid initiatives such as the US NSF Cyberinfrastructure, establishing a worldwide Grid infrastructure.

EGEE is a two-year project in a four-year programme. Two pilot applications areas have been selected: the Particle Physics applications (LHC Computing Grid - LCG), where the computing model is based exclusively on a Grid infrastructure to store and analyse petabytes of data from experiments at CERN; and Biomedical Grids, such as the proposed HealthGrid association.

Eight Russian Institutes made up the consortium RDIG (Russian Data Intensive GRID) as a national federation in the EGEE project: IHEP, IMPB RAS, ITEP, JINR, KIAM RAS, PNPI, RRC KI, SINP MSU.

We are going to create the fully operated EGEE infrastructure in Russia by:

• establishing a Russian Core Infrastructure Centre (CIC);
• establishing distributed Regional Operations Centre (ROC);
• participating in HEP and Biomedical pilot applications;
• participating in the EGEE evolution from two pilot applications to an infrastructure serving multiple scientific and technological communities;
• ensuring an outreach and training effort which can proactively market Grid services to new research communities and industry.