Doc. Luděk Matyska elected member of the EGEE Project Management Board

A participant in the Grid research of the CESNET association, doc. RNDr. Luděk Matyska, CSc of CESNET and also Masaryk University in Brno, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Informatics, has been elected by the Central-European Grid Consortium, which consists of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, to represent the said countries in the EGEE Project Management Board.

The main objective of the EGEE Project (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) is to build a stable and reliable service Grid infrastructure that would connect hundreds centres with fifty thousand processors and no less than one petabyte of disc capacity in the year 2006. A part of the EU's 6th Framework Programme, the project ranks among the EU's largest projects, both in respect to the number of participating partners and to the extent of the EU investments. The two-year project started on 1 April 2004. More than seventy partners from all over Europe, including Russia, are participating in the project. Some Asian countries, especially South Korea and Japan, as well as research institutes from the USA are also interested in co-operation with the project.

The only Czech institution participating is the CESNET group, associating experts and research teams in Grid computing and use from Masaryk University in Brno, the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the University of West Bohemia, Charles University and others.

The first project review shall take place from 9 to 11 February in the headquarters of the CERN lab in Switzerland. The event shall be used for the presentation of the first nine months of the project, as well as for the demonstration of the applications which make use of the first version of the Grid. (For more information about the project, please visit http://www.cesnet.cz/doc/2004/zprava/egee.html or http://egee-intranet.web.cern.ch/egee-intranet/gateway.html).

The CESNET association was established by colleges and universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. At present it is financed from the funds of the Government's Council for Science and Research and of its members. The association builds and develops the national optical gigabit network CESNET2 designed for science, research, development and education and conducts research and development in the field of information and communications technologies. Thanks to its research activities and the results achieved, the CESNET association is the representative of the Czech Republic in the European project GN2 and in other international projects. At present, among other projects, it is working together with Canada, the Netherlands and the US on the building of the global lambda network GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), the Czech part of which is called CzechLight.