EGEE, the Successfully Completed Pan-European Grid Infrastructure Project to Be Followed by the EGEE II

On the 23rd and 24th of May, a final review of the EGEE international project took place in Geneva. Participants in this project included CESNET, the association of Czech universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The review carried out within an evaluation procedure indicates that all objectives of the EGEE project have been successfully completed, leaving no obstacles for continuation of the EGEE project in the form of the EGEE II project.

The two-year EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe) project was a part of the 6th EU Framework Programme. Officially launched in April 2004, the project with a budget of 35 million EUR aimed to interconnect European national, regional and thematically-oriented grids in a unified European grid infrastructure. This infrastructure is now available to all members of the academic community who can benefit from its computational and storage capacity. The project has been accomplished through joint efforts of 70 institutions from all European countries, Russia and the USA as well as some Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea. The only institution from the Czech Republic participating in the project is the CESNET association, concentrating experts and teams from several institutions, especially the Masaryk University in Brno, the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and Charles University in Prague.

CESNET will also take part in the EGEE II project, seamlessly following the EGEE project. As in the case of the EGEE project, the Czech Republic will participate in all basic areas of the project, including middleware development. In this sphere, the Czech Republic will remain the only participant from all the countries of Central as well as South and South-Western Europe.

(More details of the project: http://www.ces.net/doc/2005/research/egee.html or http://egee-intranet.web.cern.ch/egee-intranet/gateway.html.)

The CESNET association was founded by universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The association is currently financed mainly from the resources of the governmental Committee for Research and Education and the resources of the members of the association. The association conducts research and development in the area of information and communication technologies, building and developing the national gigabit optical network, CESNET2, designed for research and educational purposes. Due to the research activities and results achieved, the CESNET association acts as a representative of the Czech Republic in the project, within which a pan-European network called GEANT2 is constructed, while also actively taking part in the implementation of this project.